


One Fine Summer

by Jillypups



Series: Kiss the Girl [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Bronnaery, Brotp, F/M, Fluff, It's a thing now man woohoo, Renlas too, Romance, SanSan eventually, Slow Burn, UST, a little bit of angst, a wee tiny bit of underage, grumpy!Sandor, i'm in deep y'all, like underage by TEN DAYS OKAY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-02 03:14:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 49,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2797520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jillypups/pseuds/Jillypups
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Self-made landscapers Bronn and Sandor get a high paying job a couple of years after high school, mowing the sprawling lawns up at the family stead of Highgarden Farms. He expects a fat paycheck, enough to help his old man pay the mortgage and maybe buy a twelve pack of beer to go drink by the wash with his friend. </p><p>What he didn't expect was an altercation with Margaery, blonde hair and legs too good for her age, to suddenly be haunted by her all around Sonoita, AZ. What he didn't expect was to fall in love with her before he even laid a hand on her, but Bronn's never done anything by the book, so why should he tackle love that way?</p><p>Same universe as Kiss The Girl, set 16 years earlier in 1998.</p><p>At the start of our story, Margaery is two weeks shy of her 15th birthday.<br/>Bronn turned 20 a month earlier.<br/>Sandor will be 21 that October.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wajuuniverse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wajuuniverse/gifts), [paperflowercrowns](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperflowercrowns/gifts), [vanillacoconuts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillacoconuts/gifts).



> [Inspiration](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/104128297748/coming-soon-to-an-ao3-near-you-one-fine-summer)   
>  [More awesome](http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/104215163777/one-fine-summer-by-jillypups-im-so-excited-to)   
>  [Even MORE awesome!](http://livinglikelannisters.tumblr.com/post/104158412210/so-excited-for-jillypups-new-fic-that-i-had-to)   
>  [Chapter 1 picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/105560723248/one-fine-summer-chapter-1)

The alarm clock switches on at 5:30am on the nose, yanking him out of a sweet dream, all blonde hair and tanned skin, and if it wasn’t Brooks and Dunn on the radio Bronn would throw it across the room. Instead he groans and rolls over onto his back, staring blindly at the ceiling in the predawn dark, listening to the sounds of his father’s rattling snore in the next room, and as he drifts from the land of slumber to that of the living he can pick up on the noises outside, the whicker of his dad’s horse Penny in her paddock, the jangle of a dog collar as one of their mutts shakes himself out, and finally the rustling of someone getting up off the sofa in the living room. Bronn closes his eyes in anticipation of Sandor’s typical asshole way of saying good morning, and he’s just in time before the overhead light flicks on, and his closed eyelids glow red from the sudden brightness.

“Morning,” he says, and Sandor grunts by way of reply before heading into the bathroom for a piss, which is about as cheerful as he gets ever since his brother kicked him into a campfire and burned half his face eleven years ago. Bronn sighs as he sits up and kicks off the covers, resting his elbows on his bent knees as he gets used to the sudden sweep of chill over his bare legs and beneath the thin fabric of his boxers, and as the sky outside slowly lightens to gray he grins. They’ve landed a huge job this weekend, mowing the sprawling lawn at Highgarden Farm’s main house, a mansion so big you could drop his old man’s house in it twice, and the expansive six acre yard means he and Sandor will make $1200. _Not bad for a few hours’ work,_ he thinks as he gets to his feet once the toilet flushes.

“Gonna be a good day today,” Bronn says as he passes Sandor in the hall, and they both turn sideways in the narrow hall to accommodate the other, and his friend – _and I guess that’s what we are these days, friends_ – heads to the kitchen to make coffee while Bronn uses the can and brushes his teeth before stepping into a pair of ripped up old work jeans.

“Let’s hope they like us and ask us back,” Sandor calls over his shoulder. “$1200 a week from one job and I’ll be able to get a place of my own one of these days.”

“No rush, son,” his dad says with a hack and a cough as he shuffles out of his room, scratching his head and ruffling the thinning sandy hair on the crown of his head. He is a scarecrow of a man with bony elbows and knobby knees that are hidden in his pajamas, better suited for a silver haired grandfather than a man in his late forties. Bronn's grateful for the manual labor aspect of what he and Sandor have been doing since high school, because he's got more muscle and strength than his father ever did. “I’ll be sad to see you go after all the shit you’ve done around the place,” and it’s true. Sandor’s never been _nice_ , per say, but no one could ever call him ungrateful, and he’s thrown his weight into a myriad of projects around the place in the five years he’s lived here, ever since his dad died when he was 16, adding an extension to the old barn and putting in fencing in around the property, replacing the water heater and tearing out a dozen dead trees all to repay them for letting him sleep on his sofa.

“Thanks, Jonn,” Sandor says as he sets a cup of coffee on the table for him, and Bronn sits by his father, breaking his fast with a Slim Jim and a Dr. Pepper while his dad lights his first smoke of the day. Bronn grins to see Sandor wrinkle his nose in ill-concealed disgust, but Jonn notices nothing, too fogged from sleep and smoke to see the grimace amidst the scars, and simply taps his ash into the ashtray in the center of the table before sipping his coffee.

“You boys going up to Highgarden today?” They tell him yes and he instructs them not to drive their mowers that far, says they can borrow his truck since it’s a Saturday and he’s off work today. Sandor makes himself a ham sandwich for breakfast while Bronn has another soda and a handful of cheese puffs, while his old man sticks to coffee and a cigarette. Soon they’re out the door, Jonn to the stables to feed Penny and Sandor and Bronn to wrangle the mowers into his dad’s truck and the beat up old Nissan pickup Sandor inherited from _his_ father when he died of old age or a broken heart or both.

“Jesus Christ, I always forget how big this place is,” Bronn mutters from the cab of his dad’s truck, forearms draped over the steering wheel as he stares at the long driveway flanked by cypress trees, catches sight of the main house so big it could be a museum. He shifts into second as he follows Sandor down the stretch of paved driveway, the sunrise a spray of pink and orange and yellow behind the house as if Mace paid someone to make the sun shine on Highgarden before the rest of the world.

Highgarden. _Some palace,_ he thinks as he parks. The main house looks like it belongs on some southern plantation, all roman columns and wrap around porches, trellises of roses down the front of the porch and magnolia trees flanking it, and the driveway curves in a loop in the front with a wide circular sprawl of grass in the middle of it. It’s there that he decides he’ll start while Sandor chooses the side yard, and they unload the thick wood planks and set them up against the open tailgates to get the mowers down to the driveway. Wordlessly, seamlessly as they have worked for a couple of years now, they turn to their tasks and leave the other alone, and Bronn gets up onto the massive John Deere his dad helped him buy when it became clear this was the work he wanted to do for a living, and he fires it to life.

It’s easy enough work, the simplest and laziest they do, riding round and round in patterns thought up to fit the shape of whatever they mow, and he’s even seen a look of peaceful sort of contentment on Sandor’s face when he’s mowing out precise yet creative stripes or checkers in someone’s yard. It’s where he’s already slipping, that satisfied hum of an unbusy brain and the simple pleasure of doing a job well when the front door bangs open so loud he can hear it over the churn and roar of the mower’s engine, and his jaw drops when he sees a mop of blonde hair bouncing out towards him.

She’s a pair of little shorts and clenched fists, and he can almost, almost hear the slap of her bare feet on the asphalt as she crosses the driveway towards him, and before he knows what he’s doing Bronn turns off the mower and dismounts. He takes off his baseball hat and rubs the back of his head, confused over this interruption, this strange arrival of so small and fiery a thing, because she’s _little._ Elfish features, wide eyes and a mouth shaped like the curve of a bow, though it’s an angry bow right now, and he’s more confused than ever. _What the fuck did_ I _do wrong?_

“What’s up,” he says when she approaches him, and she _Hmmphs,_ her nostrils an angry flare that make him think of fine boned horses, but then she shoves him so hard he staggers back, and the dew on the grass is as big a culprit as she is, because he slips like he’s standing on ice and falls to his ass so hard it makes him laugh.

 

He _laughs_ at her, this lawn mower guy who wakes her up at dawn on the first weekend she hasn’t had hours’ worth of homework to do, and it infuriates her as much as the cold dew under her feet makes her shiver, and she’s almost angry enough to ignore that his face cracks bright and cheerful like a sun when he’s laughing, that he’s sandy hair and tanned face and white teeth.

“I’ve made girls mad before in my life but I usually know why,” he says, rocking himself up off his back to his feet in one fluid motion, bending down to pick up the faded old baseball hat up off the wet grass before setting it back on his head. He’s as tall as Loras and broader in the shoulders than even Willas, star athlete of the family, and though he’s built like a man he is all _boy,_ and his grin makes her think of Christmas morning, of pranks on April Fools and how she likes to sneak cookies to bed at midnight. It makes her stand up straighter, makes her flip her hair. “You gonna fill me in on why you’re pushing me on my ass all of a sudden, huh, little miss?”

“Do you have _any_ idea how freakin’ early it is right now? On a _Saturday?_ ” She crosses her arms over her chest, shivering in this cold air, remembers how her father tells her farm life starts before dawn though she does her best to ignore and forget it. Because the last thing she wants is to wrap herself in expensive cashmere like her mother and pretend her livelihood isn’t based on root vegetables and the right PH levels from cow shit in the soil. Margaery lifts her chin and sniffs, hugs herself a little tighter and glares as best she can on such little sleep, but this guy is incredulous, folding his own arms over his t-shirt and leaning into her with another one of those smile-spread laughs of his.

“Honey, I’ve been up for over an hour, _on a Saturday,_ so yeah I know how early it is. I was hired to do a job so I’m doing it,” he says, taking out, unwrapping and popping into his mouth a piece of wintergreen gum. She can smell the mint from here where she stands, not two feet from him.

“Does my father even know you’re out here this early?” Her words sound haughty to her ears but they also make her feel imperious, like a queen, and she sniffs as she looks at him, but then he’s laughing again, and before Margaery can help herself she’s shoving him again, though he’s ready for it this time and doesn’t fall down. “Stop laughing at me!”

“Look, he’s the one who hired me, and no farming man is gonna get pissed that his yard gets mowed two hours after he gets up,” he says. She huffs at him, folding her arms across her chest again because he’s got her there. “I bet he’s been up before dawn just the same as me, hasn’t he, small fry?” He grins, chewing his gum, eyebrows raised, and she narrows her eyes at his behavior.

“Nobody talks to me that way, and stop calling me _honey_ and _little miss_ and _small fry,_ ” she snaps. He is undisturbed by her anger, and she wonders what the hell could wipe that grin off his face.

“Yeah, well, I’m not nobody, all right? And I don’t know what the hell else to call you except maybe a few other names, and believe me, _little miss,_ you won’t be too happy to hear them,” he says, and she sucks in a gasp at the implication, and then to her shock and disbelief he mocks her pose, folding his arms across his chest once more and cocking a hip out, and she cannot help but burst into laughter when he taps his foot in the grass the way she’s doing right now.

“My _name_ is Margaery,” she says once she’s recovered herself and bitten off the laughter, letting it soar up to the sky like a loosed balloon. She regards him with a lift of her chin, wishing he wasn’t so much taller than she is, but she has never been accused of being a shrinking violet, of having a shivery, chin-tremble personality, so she stands up straight and throws her shoulders back. “Margaery Tyrell, and don’t you forget it, _honey,_ ” she adds, whipping her hair over her shoulder as she spins on her bare heel in the cold, wet grass.

“I think that’d be impossible, Margie,” he says, and when she lifts her hand to flip him the bird, something her grandmother would _kill her_ for, his laughter rings out, crisp and bright like a tart apple, and the smile comes from nowhere though she bites her lip to keep it from spreading any further. She recalls how his jaw muscles worked when he chewed his gum, _Like an absolute hick,_ she thinks, how broad his shoulders were and how amused his dark eyes were, mischievous like a coyote’s. It’s impossible to resist, the urge to glance over her shoulder before slamming the door shut, and she feels a girlish thrill, the same one she got when Quentyn asked her to homecoming last fall, to see that he’s looking at her, arms still across his chest as he leans against the lawn mower, and she says _Damn_ under her breath.

“I didn’t expect you to be up this early, sweetheart,” her mother says when she makes her way to the kitchen, stopping in the hall to grab an old college sweatshirt of Willas’s, and she’s tugging it over her head as her mom looks up from the crossword and cup of coffee at the table in the breakfast nook. She is framed by the huge window behind her, is backed by blue sky and sunlight, looks as content as a cat sunning itself but then, that’s essentially what she’s doing.

“Lawnmower,” she says, and she means to be grumpy about it, means to yawn irritably and complain, but she’s bright eyed and alert from the altercation, the exchange, the whatever-you-call-it. It’s not that she’s got her hackles raised or her blood up but there’s something snapping and alive rattling around inside her. She reasons that the air had been chilly and the damp grass cold, very different from the soft warmth of her bed which is where 6:30am usually finds her, but then there’s that laugh again, ringing in her ears. “Is there any iced tea?”

“I made a fresh pitcher not twenty minutes ago,” Alerie says, her hair a molten mix of silver and gold where the sun shines on it. Margaery has heard the phrase _growing old gracefully_ and thinks her mother has mastered it, and she hopes she’s as lucky. There’s a dish of freshly cut lemon wedges on the top shelf of the fridge next to the cut glass pitcher, and Margaery grabs both, fixing herself a tall glass with two wedges and a straw, and she comes to sit next to her mother, pushing the sleeves of Willas’s sweatshirt up to her elbows.

“So where did dad find that lawn mower guy?” she asks lightly, stirring her drink with the straw, watching the early sunlight splinter and bloom through the ice and the tea and against the yellow of citrus.

“Guys, plural,” her mother corrects her after bowing her head and penning a word into the crossword with a soft, satisfied _Aha._ “Renly recommended them after they helped save his grapes from that frost a few weeks ago. I guess they worked all night with him and were very professional,” but all Margaery can think about it the snap of his gum and _small fry,_ of his laughter and his irreverence. _I’m not nobody,_ he’d said, and she sips her tea, thinking he’s right.

“Oh they are,” she says with a small smile. “It looked like he- they were doing a really good job,” she says. “You should tell dad to hire them on for the garden out back too. I’ve always wanted to um, to grow a bunch of roses. Yeah, roses,” and she wonders if she’s pushing it too far, because one thing she has _never_ showed even the remotest interest in is farming, growing, planting, cultivating. She wants to be a runway model and a photographer, a horseback rider or maybe a news reporter, but following her father and older brother’s footsteps has never been on her mind.

“Do you really, now,” Alerie says, sitting back away from her crossword puzzle to sip her coffee and gaze at her only daughter. She is high cheekbones and full mouth, as gorgeous as they come though she is also soft from maternal love and living for others, and right now she’s bright with hope. “Your father would be thrilled to hear that,” she smiles, and Margaery shrugs, plays it cool, plays it bored, plays it like a pro.

“Or whatever, you know, no big deal,” she says, grabbing her tea to go back upstairs to her room, and she grins when she glances out a window, can see that lawn mower guy, the gum chewer, the laugher. She watches him a moment, drinking her tea, and all her previous annoyance from the roar and buzz and growl of his stupid loud mower is gone. There is a flounce to her step as she climbs the white carpeted stairs back to her bedroom, there is a smug little hum in the back of her throat as she sets her tea on her nightstand and crawls back in bed, pulling the covers to her chest before turning the TV in the corner of her room to CMT.

 _You called me Margie,_ she thinks, _and now I’m going to figure out what to call_ you.

 

“What the hell was all that about,” Sandor says when they’re finished after a solid five hours’ worth of mowing, mowing, mowing, and they’re both sweating under the April morning sun.

“Hell if I know, man. That little pop tart just came out of nowhere, yelling at me about the noise. I guess she’s Mace’s daughter,” he says, and he’s still amused at the gumption of that kid, coming at him with guns blazing and a shove hard enough to knock him down. _And that foot tap!_ She’s obviously just a high school girl but he hasn’t been witness to or recipient of that sort of incredulous scolding since before his mom split on them; if little miss Margie had a spatula or wooden spoon in her hand it wouldn’t have surprised him.

“So long as you didn’t yell at her back. The last thing we need to do is piss off Mace fuckin’ Tyrell,” Sandor says with a grunt as he pushes the mower up the planks and into the back of Jonn’s truck. “I have plans and they all take money, more than Doran’s gonna give us for weeding and changing out his pool filters,” and he knows his friend has hopes for the future, high ones when compared to the relative bleakness of his past.

“She was mad we were here so early on a Saturday,” he says, tugging the mower from the bed of the truck as Sandor shoves it, and when it rolls into place he switches it out of neutral and leans against the cab of the truck to swig his Gatorade, ignoring the clash of it against the mint of his gum. Sandor huffs.

“I can’t remember the last time I spent a Saturday morning in bed. Must be fuckin’ nice,” he says, and Bronn grins.

“And you don’t even sleep in a bed,” he says.

Sandor laughs.

They drop the mowers off at home and make quesadillas for lunch, tearing up lunch meat and crushing tortilla chips on top, and they slug hot sauce on them like it’s going out of style. His dad’s out riding Penny and so it’s just the two of them eating standing up in the kitchen, Bronn over the sink and Sandor by the trash can.  The phone rings and they let the machine get it, his father’s croaky old voice creeping in from the living room, and it’s the only sound for a while aside from the near silent chewing in the kitchen.

“You hear Barristan’s selling a chunk of his land?” Bronn says after washing down his lunch with a glass of lukewarm tap water, and Sandor nods, coming to the sink for the same ho hum refreshment, and he thinks maybe he’ll ask Sandor, who's more than six months his senior and looks like he's 25, to see about getting some beers later that afternoon.

“Yeah, ten acres, and pretty nice considering he hasn’t let his stupid cattle on it in a few years,” he says, and Bronn studies him up close for a minute when he turns to lean against the sink and drink his water. Dark and brooding, those are words to describe Sandor Clegane, dark, brooding, and searching for something, something he never puts a voice to, something Bronn can pick up on.

“You could make him an offer,” he suggests, and Sandor lets slip a chuckle, and it’s not a lighthearted one.

“He wants $75,000, man, I’m nowhere close to that,” he says with a shake of his head, and his hair is growing out, and some of it drops down into his eyes. Sandor doesn’t bother brushing it away, is probably growing it long so he’s got somewhere to hide no matter where he goes.

“What’d your old man leave you, again?” Bronn doesn’t care about money and never remembers figures because he knows it’s a world he’ll never be a part of, not here on this sprawl of land his dad’s still paying off, not when his main goal in life is to just live it, free as he can, cheap as he can, closest to the ground as he can.

Even though they are alone, Sandor glances around, looks out back through the open window over the sink to make sure the horses aren’t listening, that the dogs aren’t going to bark out his secret to the whole world.

“$50,000,” he says quietly, and Bronn whistles, low and long, because that’s one hell of a chunk of change. When his dad moves on to his greater reward he expects the house and the land and the debt that comes with it, the mangy mutts and the handful of chickens that squabble with each other in the pale grass back behind the barn. He knows there’s no money.

“I’d have blown through it in a year if I’d have gotten that much cash in high school,” he says with a shake of his head. “To think you’ve got fifty grand under the sofa in our living room and my dad doesn’t even lock the door.”

“Nobody thinks they’re gonna find any money in this place,” Sandor grins, and Bronn laughs because it’s true.

“So, $25,000 away,” he says, and then he shrugs. “Barristan could give you a deal. He’s crotchety about newcomers coming to town, and if you made him an offer, even if it’s only two thirds of it he might consider. Maybe throw in some landscaping free of charge,” he says, and his coworker chews on this for a while. Bronn can see his gears work, but then there is a shake of his head and of black hair because if there’s one thing Sandor’s not, it’s an optimist.

“He may not like newcomers but he’s not an idiot. No way he’d take a third less of his asking price just to keep rich fucks out of Phoenix from being his new neighbor,” but Bronn isn’t so sure.

“Offer him the $50,000 for seven acres with the understanding you’ll buy the last three over the next, fuck, I don’t know, ten years or whatever,” and he grins because he’s got him there. Sandor _Humphs_ at that, sets down his glass on the counter and folds his arms over his chest.

“So long as we keep getting business from Mace and Renly, so long as your dad doesn’t start charging me rent, maybe,” he says, more to himself than to Bronn.

“There’s no way my dad would ever,” he says, clapping Sandor on the back before pushing off the counter. He finds the bowl of kitchen scraps in the fridge and takes them out to the chickens, leaving Sandor with his cautious dreaming and the fetters of his past, and as he chucks the apple cores and celery leaves, the carrot and potato peels, the biggest of the hens makes a beeline for it, grousing after her sisters to shoo them away, and Bronn laughs because he is reminded of a blonde girl named Margaery, though he thinks Margie suits her better, too big for her britches and too cute for her own damned good.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tiny little shout out to Rickon in Come Over Here and Kiss Me, if you can find it. :)
> 
>  
> 
> [picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/106243011978/one-fine-summer-chapter-2-feels)
> 
> Brand New Day by Kodaline, perfect song for this chapter.

They’re talking about _The Good Earth_ in English class, her last class of the day, and Margaery finds she’s equal parts bored and sad; bored because she finished it and came to her own conclusions three weeks ago, and sad because she just feels _bad_ for Wang. She stretches her toes in her sandals, monumentally relieved she’s never had to deal with anything like foot binding, and gazes out the window at the front lawn outside, watered year round so it’s green and soft enough for kids to sit on during lunch hour and study halls. There’s a small cluster of students out there now, tucked up under the blousy, droopy shade of a massive mimosa tree, its pink firework blossoms a merry riot of color.

She can recognize Quentyn, sitting in the small circle of students, his dark head bent over whatever book he’s reading. Margaery smiles; they went to homecoming last fall and he kissed her in the dark before her mom came to pick her up, and it was kind of wet and kind of sweet, neither her first nor her best kiss but it was a kiss just the same. She isn’t sure how she feels about him, either; he smiles her way often enough and he even took her to see _Titanic,_ though she was too much of a sobbing, heartbroken mess at the end of it to muster up or receive any romantic overture. _He’s cute, though,_ she thinks, but decidedly _not_ blonde. Decidedly _not_ amusing in a coyote-cowboy-hick sort of way.

A sleek forest green Jaguar pulls up the loop of driveway and honks so enthusiastically that several of the English students turn to look outside until Mr. Lomys clears his throat and gives them all a cheerful glare over the rims of his wire framed glasses. It’s more boring discussion of themes and _blahblahblah_ , and with the slam of the car door, her attention wanders back to the scene outside.

“Hey, Alysanne,” she hisses, leaning over her desk to tap her friend’s shoulder, nodding her head to the window when the brunette turns to look at her. “Who is that?” Because a gorgeous woman with cocoa skin and ringlets of hair the color of blackberries is walking around the front of the luxury vehicle towards the study hall students sitting in the shade on the lawn. _She moves like a panther,_ she thinks, and the make of the car she drives seems rather fitting all of a sudden, and she’s panther-walking to Quentyn who leaps to his feet to hug her, and now Margaery narrows her eyes.

“That’s Arianne,” Alysanne whispers, “Quentyn’s sister. She was in Jack’s class,” she says of her older brother. “She must be visiting from college,” and Margaery’s eyebrows lift as she looks back outside. It makes sense now, the fancy car and the dark features Quentyn shares with her, the carefree flaunt of wealth. The Martells came up to the states from Hermosillo determined to break into the wine business, and they now own the biggest vineyard in Sonoita, and while they still ship in grapes from California it’s done solely for flavor and not for lack of their own grape production. Like the flip of a switch she goes from jealousy to approval, from suspicion to admiration, and she doodles clusters of grapes in the margins of her notebook for the rest of class.

“What’s up, Mini Me?” Loras says as she gets into his beat up old Mustang, and she rolls her eyes at his new favorite nickname for her, though it does sort of make sense. They’re the same color eyes and the same tumble of hair though she has been accused of having sly eyes while Loras’s are all guileless and amiable, the world’s sweetest big brother. She’s been following him around since she started walking, and the scant two years between them has done little, if anything, to encourage a rift between them.

“Do you know who Arianne Martell is?” she asks once they’re on the road back to Sonoita, the only high school close enough being Buena High in Sierra Vista, and Loras gives a low whistle.

“Ah, the stone fox,” he grins, glancing over his shoulder as he changes lanes and speeds up past the slower drivers to their right. “Broke Willas’s heart I guess, and then they both wound up going to the U of A. Luckily it’s big enough a campus to avoid her, and I think he’s over it for the most part,” and he laughs when she demands to know why she was in the dark about all that, and he tells her that some talk is best left between brothers.

“So she’s a heartbreaker, huh,” Margaery says, finds there’s something kind of appealing of how that sounds, and she wonders if she could ever move like a panther, sway of hip and swish of hair, lethal femininity, a man eater.

“I guess so,” Loras says with a shrug. “She graduated before I went to Buena,” he says, and then they’re talking about his soccer practice and how Brienne, the only girl on the team, made every goal except the one Loras got, and he’s never been so proud to get beaten by a girl because at least he went down fighting. She laughs to think of tall Brienne punting ball after ball into the net while all the other dumb boys stand around watching, scratching their heads or their asses in dazed wonderment.

“Looks like Renly got a new truck,” Margaery says when they’re on the 83, and they all three of them wave at each other, Renly a speeding flash of scruffy grin and sunglasses, a baseball hat that reminds her of a nameless landscaper and a month old morning of cold dew and crisp air. While the sight of him tugs her mind in this other direction she also cannot help but notice that Loras is a head tilt and a gaze in the side view mirror, is a smile on the face and builder of castles made of clouds. She is nobody’s fool. While she’s the only person her brother has come out to he has still never confided in her the boys who turn his head, but it literally just happened now, and she gasps with delight, making him double take to see her turned towards him in the bucket seat with her jaw dropped open.

“What’s gotten into you,” he says, and she watches him dust off the daydream, sees the faraway look dissolve in the blue of his eyes, and her heart goes out to him.

“Someone’s crushing on a certain young winemaker,” she grins, and his jaw drops, but there is an upward curl at the corners of his mouth, Loras’s biggest tell when he’s bluffing, that almost-smile that gives him away as a bad liar and an ultimately honest person.

“You’re out of your mind, stupid,” he says before turning back to the road, and he adjusts his grip of the steering wheel so many times she laughs.

“You’re out of _your_ mind if you think I can’t see through you,” she says, slouching down in her seat with a laugh, propping up a sandaled foot on the dash until he swats her shin, forcing her to drop it back to the footwell. “Loras and Renly, sitting in a tree,” she begins, but his groan drowns her out.

“Dammit, Margaery, cut it out, it’s not funny. If you tell mom or dad,” he warns, but it’s not necessary, and part of her is hurt that he thinks she’d ever blow his cover. But he lowers his voice even in the safe seclusion of his car, and the fear and worry in his expression is enough to wash away the wounded feelings, because it’s serious, his anxiety, it’s palpable, his concern. It’s not easy being closeted out here in cowboy country; it’s not easy walking that line of deception and self-preservation to protect oneself when the price is a heavy one: a withered and wilted heart.

“Why don’t you just go for it?” she shrugs, looking away from him to gaze at the grassland, glittering and pale under the afternoon sun and stretch of blue sky. Loras snorts.

“Please. He’s twenty one,” he says, and again her thoughts are pulled to that morning; she can still feel his chest against her palms, and it was _nothing_ like Quentyn’s skinny shoulders under the drape of her forearms during the homecoming dance. Lawnmower guy was muscle and he was warm, solid and all grown up despite that boyish grin, despite the crinkle and winkle of his eyes.

“So what, like that’s got anything to do with it, in the end. Age is just a number,” she grins, and he laughs at that. “Why does that matter, if there’s love?”

“Easy for you to say,” he says with a glance, swinging off the 83 onto the road that will wind and twist, that will bring them down to the lush lowland of Highgarden. “Besides, I think he’s into girls,” he says sheepishly, eyes firmly focused on the road ahead of them. “At least he was in high school when Willas would talk about him,” he says, and she wonders how long he’s crushed on him, how long he’s pined for Renly Baratheon.

“That was high school,” she says. “A lot can change after high school,” and her voice drifts to nothing, petals blown off a blossom in the breeze when they pull up to the back of the house and she sees the landscaper guys pulling rosebush after rosebush from the bed of a truck. _Daddy did it,_ she thinks with a thrill, to see so many roses, _he took the bait, and now I’ll get his name._ She sees his shoulder blades moving beneath his shirt as he works, how the jersey stretches between them like string between fingers busy at cat’s cradle, watches as he straightens and sweeps his forearm across his forehead before setting the baseball hat on his head. She smiles without realizing it, turning her head to gaze at him as they drive away towards the garage, thinks of his laughter that’s rung inside her head for a month, is unaware of her expression until Loras’s laughter brings her back down to earth.

“Age is just a number, huh,” he says as he kills the ignition here in the dark cool of the garage.

“I’ll prove it,” she vows.

 

“Here comes the boss,” Sandor says with a snort as he turns away to pull another shrub from the truck, and Bronn glances up from his squat amidst the roses where he’s inspecting an exposed root base. It’s that little pistol walking towards them, a backpack slung over a shoulder and the swish of a dress around her legs. She’s warm cookies and brown sugar, all golden hair and tanned skin, Barbie’s little sister with her shades and hot pink nail polish. He grins.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” he says, and it’s a far cry from when he first met her, the way she smiles instead of storms, the easy way she comes to a stop in front of him instead of bum rushing him like a quarterback in the back half of the game. There is a sea of rosebuds between them and she’s as colorful as they are in her flowery little dress.

“Speak for yourself,” she says, and then she says _Oh_ when Sandor thunks another bush down and looks down at her. Bronn glances between them, at Sandor’s glare and Little Miss Thing’s look of surprise, but he has to hand it to her. He can practically see the shrug of indifference when her face clears and smoothes out, can practically hear the _Who cares_ in her voice when she introduces herself to Sandor as Margaery, hand held out. He glances down at her hand and grunts before giving her his name, turns away from the unshaken hand to grab the last rose from the truck, and Bronn’s heart goes out to her, with that crestfallen look on her elfish face.

“Hey, don’t pay him any attention,” he says, standing swiftly to shake her hand in the wake of Sandor’s rude cold shoulder, and it’s cool and it’s small in the palm of his hand, smooth like a satin ribbon though he has little enough experience with those things, with that sort of world. His is a land of labor and sweat, horsehair and the click of dog nails on the linoleum floor. She’s perfume and plush carpeting, sunlight through lace curtains and that cute smile of hers that she’s tipping up at him right now.

“Thanks,” she says, and they’re still shaking hands when Sandor nudges him over to set the last shrub between them.

“Come on, Bronn, they’re not gonna plant themselves,” he says, and the contact is gone, pulled apart like cotton candy when they drop their hands, but she’s grinning like the Cheshire cat now, and he finds himself grinning right back.

“Bronn,” she says. “So that’s _your_ name,” and he nods, half curious as to why she cares, half pleased to see she does.

“Don’t wear it out,” he says, and he laughs when she rolls her eyes at him.

It’s all because of her they’re here, and he has a mind to thank her for it. Mace Tyrell called three weeks ago to task them with the job of planting a rose garden for his daughter who wants to learn how to tend them, and Sandor had the balls to ask for $500 up front to order and have shipped the plants. They ordered three dozen from Mesquite Valley Growers when Mace gave them the square footage, finally got them in today, and it’s a huge sprawl of green, green grass beside the patio. The flagstone edges a huge swimming pool, the water a sparkling mirror of the blue sky above, and Bronn thinks it’s about the same size as his old man’s barn.

“So you’re into roses, huh,” he says as she explains that she wants them in the shape of a rainbow, arcing from one end of the patio to the other, a shore of flowers that meets the ocean of the pool. He and Sandor set about positioning the roses how she wants, and once she changes into jeans and a ratty old t-shirt she helps them out.

He finds he is sorry to see the dress go.

“I’ve never grown anything before, so I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out,” she says with a grin, and he throws his head back to laugh at the idea of this little half pint girl getting hundreds of dollars’ worth of roses on a whim, when he and his dad had to plan for months before going into town to buy him school clothes. He’d be annoyed at her flippancy if she wasn’t grunting and groaning alongside him, if there weren’t streaks of dirt on her cheeks and on the peach fuzz of her forearms, golden against the sun-kiss of her skin. She stands on the flagstone with her hands on her hips, gazing at their work so far, and then she trots out amongst the roses, switching the places of some of them, and he realizes she’s meticulously arranging the colors so it looks haphazard while making sure there’s not too much of one color in any area, and Bronn finds he’s impressed.

“Well aren’t you clever,” he says as he stands next to her for the full effect, and she’s a happy beam of pride at the compliment. It makes him feel good to see it there on her face and to know he’s planted it there, a rosebud of his own, and he clears his throat and looks away when he realizes he’s checking out this girl, this high school student with a Jansport backpack, this _kid_ who can’t even drive yet.

“My bedroom is just over there,” she says, gesturing behind her, and hers is the window that looks right out over the pool, “and I want the view to be perfect,” and he’s thinking about her bedroom now, and he feels like a pervert, a dirty old man at twenty.

“Well, little miss, I’d say it’s damn near perfect, then,” and he chuckles when she agrees with him.

“So what’s the deal with that guy,” she whispers, leaning into him with conspiratorial air, and she’s close enough to put his arm around her, close enough he can smell her shampoo. _Flowers, of course._ He is happy to take his mind off of her so he tells her about Sandor, the burns he got when he was ten, and she gasps in recognition, grabs his bicep to stop him talking, and it works. He’s staring at her hand when next she speaks.

“His _brother_ did it, right? That Gregor guy,” she says.

“You’re a little young to know Gregor, thank God. That guy was a monster, man,” and she arches her brow at the age comment.

“ _Everyone_ knows about Gregor, Bronn. He’s like the boogey man of Sonoita. I heard he tried to, you know, take advantage of a _teacher_ over at Buena,” she says with a shudder, and he’s grateful she drops her hand from his arm, her fingertips four drifts across the sleeve of his t-shirt. He hasn’t gone to Buena in two years and yet that’s her entire world now. Bronn grunts.

“Yeah, he’s a real piece of work. Thank God he’s over in Iraq now. I hope they blow him to bits,” he says savagely as he watches his friend bend and stand, bend and stand as he sets out the roses. He glances down to Margie who’s looking at him in surprise. He shrugs. “Sandor’s an asshole, but he’s my friend, man. I’d kick Gregor’s ass if I didn’t think he’s snap my neck.”

“He’s a jerk but he’s your jerk, huh?” she grins and he laughs with a nod. “Well, he’d be nicer if he had someone to love him,” she says with a wistful, girlish sigh and he is struck by her, this little firecracker with dirt on her face and a million bucks in the bank. Sandor’s scars didn’t scare her and his shitty attitude didn’t piss her off, and despite both of those things she’s sitting here wishing love on the big bastard. She is mystifying to him, a strange little puzzle here, and he has to remind himself that she’s not his to figure out. _I’m no good at puzzles anyhow,_ he thinks.

“Careful there,” Sandor says when they’re slaking their thirst back by the truck, because he’s just been busted ogling her, how the waistband of her jeans slides down when she bends over, how her hands work when she pulls her hair up into a ponytail high on the crown of her head, how there are still wisps of blonde that curl against the long nape of her neck. “That’s dangerous, right there,” and he nods in her direction.

“I know it is,” Bronn says quickly, because it’s true. He tries thinking of _women_ , women his age like clever, calculating Arianne, those tidal wave hips and that devastating mouth, and though she used to make his dick hard once upon a time, right now she’s doing nothing for him. _Fuck._ He sighs. “Believe me, I know it is.”

 

He’s easy to talk to, this guy whose name is Bronn, this guy with the fast grins and rolling laughter that reminds her of the landscape, the tumble of hills and wind-whip of grass, and she hopes it’s not too obvious that she can’t stop looking his way. His friend Sandor with the scars has already taken his shirt off, and while she can’t help but be impressed with his mass and that Arizona tattoo on his back, she secretly hopes Bronn gets overheated as well. It’s then that she realizes she’s crushing on him, hard. _Where did that come from,_ she wonders, because there are plenty of cute boys at Buena, cuter than Quentyn, and plenty have come knocking around her door, all high school swagger and cracking voices, all push and shove with each other on the basketball court. They are all just boys playing at being men and the game has gotten boring to her now. She likes _this_ guy, though, this man who doesn’t take himself too seriously but will still leap to his friend’s defense, this hick who talks to her however the hell he likes.

She likes it too.

He’s telling her about his dad’s horse Penny whose been an old lady since she was a filly, calls her a slow moving artillery piece, the turn of phrase making her laugh, and she’s enjoying the way he’s grinning at her when Loras steps out of the French doors. The noise makes them both turn in unison, and her brother shakes his head with a roll of his eyes.

“Mom wants you to help set the table for dinner,” he says, turning on his heel to disappear back in the house, and while she’s mildly embarrassed to be beckoned inside for something so childish, his presence reminds her of something. She turns back to Bronn with so swift a twist she snares his attention immediately.

“Hey, do you by chance know Renly Baratheon?” and she hopes she’s a picture of nonchalance and casual interest, just another small town person asking about the neighbors.

“Yeah,” he says slowly, shoulders coming forward as he sticks his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “We went to high school together. What about him? You’re a little young to be asking about a vintner,” and she narrows her eyes at the reference to her age.

“Well,” she says, drawing out the word to give herself time to find more of them, crossing her arms over her chest. “I was just, you know, wondering if he was seeing anyone?” and his loud bark of laughter is so loud it makes her jump.

“You sure set your sights high, don’t you?” he says, chuckling again when she tells him not to get fresh with her. “No, Margie, I don’t think he’s seeing anybody. You can be as determined as you want though, I don’t think he’d go for you even if you weren’t a kid in high school,” and she has half a mind to shove him again, would probably do it if something he’s just said didn’t get the wheels turning in her head.

“Wait, what’s that mean,” she says, daring herself to hope. She thinks of Loras with the sweet smiles, Loras with so much love to give and no one to give it to, seventeen year old heartthrob Loras who makes the girls swoon, who takes them to school dances though he can’t bring himself to kiss them.

“It means I don’t think he’s much swayed by the ladies,” Bronn says with a shrug, and she cannot help herself, cannot keep her grin from spreading across her mouth like a lip-licking pat of butter swept across a warm piece of bread. Bronn’s eyes roll at her reaction, likely thinking she’s responding to this information like anyone here does when they hear new gossip, and that makes her grin even more because _If only you knew, honey._

“Oh,” she says with a nod, stepping backwards towards the house, hugging herself with relish and happiness. She’s already got Loras and Renly riding off into the sunset holding hands, and there is not one single part of her that feels stupid for it. “Oh, okay, then. I have to go in now, but I’ll see you around,” she says, as much to give him the idea as to make it true, like whispering a magic spell. She turns around and walks around the pool, still grinning like an idiot.

“You got a thing for older guys, huh?” he asks, and it’s probably because she’s so happy for Loras, it’s _got_ to be, because before she knows it she’s turning, walking backwards towards the house to let him see her grin, to make sure he hears her and hears her good.

“Not older ‘guys,’ plural. Older ‘guy,’ singular,” she says with a lift of her eyebrows, and all though dinner, fried chicken and coleslaw, potatoes and salad, all through talk of Willas graduating college later that month and Loras getting straight As, through talk of rosebushes and the farm output earlier that spring, all she can think about is the look on his face when she dropped that bomb on him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/106337097498/one-fine-summer-chapter-3-feels)

Bronn’s glad they’re in his dad’s truck because driving gives him something to do, something to take his mind off of what Margie just said to him, but whenever he slows down for a turn, when he has to stop so Sandor can shoo away a scatter of geese out of the road, he sees with his mind’s eye the way she backed away from him, the setting sun lighting her up with orange and red. _Older guy, singular,_ she said with a hundred watt smiles and her hands in her pockets. He mutters to himself as Sandor waves his arms and shouts, kicks out at the goose who tries to nip him, but when his friend high tails it back to the truck with the gander in hot pursuit, Bronn laughs, grateful for the distraction.

“Fucking bastard,” Sandor says when he slams the door shut, and Bronn isn’t sure if he’s talking about him or the goose. “God I hate those things.”

“They didn’t seem too impressed with you, either,” he says, laughing again when Sandor gives him a dirty look. He honks a few times to get the last bird out of the road and then he’s shifting from neutral to first and then they’re on their way back home, and the brief distraction and hilarity with the geese is working, his mind is a blissful blank, but then Sandor opens his mouth.

“So, what exactly are you doing with that girl, huh?” He is turned towards Bronn on the bench seat, back against the passenger window, is all scrutiny, and his disapproval fills the cramped cab until Bronn damn near feels claustrophobic. It’s thicker than their sweat and far less appealing, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

“Dude, I’m not doing _anything,_ okay? I mean, you were by the truck, you didn’t hear what she said to me,” he says, and then he tells Sandor about the bizarre mention of Renly, completely out of left field, how she responded to him when he asked if she had a thing for older guys. _Singular._ Bronn is filled with excitement and dread in equal measure when he thinks of it.

“You’re crazy, man, she asked about Renly and then told you she’s only into one older guy. It’s obviously him she’s talking about. Christ knows the girls were all over him in school,” and it’s bitterness that flattens out his words into dull, listless things, all lack of shine like a beaten up belt buckle abandoned in the back of some forgotten closet.

“No, I told her I don’t think he’s into chicks. He hasn’t been with a woman in years, and you know there were rumors,” but Sandor just shrugs. “Look, you didn’t see the _look_ she gave me, okay? I swear she was flirting with me,” Bronn says, but then he’s all self-doubt and _Wait, was she?_

“She’s in high school, dude, she’s too young to flirt,” and he supposes Sandor wouldn’t get it because it’s not like anyone ever flirted with him in his entire high school career. _Yeah, she was, she was flirting with me,_ he thinks. _Girls don’t smile and say stuff like that just for fun. Do they?_

“If you say so,” Bronn mutters, slouching in his seat as he slows for a turn. _Not older guys, plural,_ and if he wasn’t driving he’d close his eyes against the memory. Blonde ponytail, streak of dirt on her cheek, the slouch of her jeans and that damnable grin.

“Well, whatever she said, she’s better off chasing Renly Baratheon than she is you,” Sandor says with a huff of laughter as they pull up the twisty driveway, and Bronn parks the truck next to the barn in the blonde grass, and there is a swarm of canine welcome around the vehicle.

“Oh yeah, and why is that?” he says as he gets out of the truck with a slam of the door, and he’s nearly knocked over by the prancing of four legged love, save for Tripod, the black lab born with a missing leg. Bronn crouches down and gives him the longest scratch at the base of his whipping tail.

“Because Renly won’t touch her, and my hopes aren’t high for you,” he says. “You’re starting to look at her like she’s the first Christmas tree you’ve ever laid eyes on,” and he squats down to let the dogs lick his face. They’re the only creatures he has ever seen Sandor let touch his scars, and it’s the sight of him accepting their affection that dampens the flare of temper Bronn feels at the insult. He gives a final pat to Tripod before standing up and crossing the driveway to the house.

“I swear to God, man, I’m not going to do anything, all right?” he says through gritted teeth, letting the screen door slap shut behind him as he heads inside.

But it’s a lie, because that night he cannot sleep, is all toss and turn and punches to his pillow. His window is open and it feels like the breezes are pulling in the moon and stars, the entire night sky into his room, and he’s heard of shit like spring fever but he’s never felt it like this before. The sneaking suspicion that it’s less to do with seasons and more to do with a spitfire girl is a confirmed fact when the thought of her makes his heart beat faster.

“Goddammit,” he says under his breath as he sits up and flings the covers off of his legs, staring grumpily out the open window, mismatched drapes a flit and flutter in the wind, the night air as restless as he is. A glance to his alarm clock tells him it’s 10:45pm, and with a frustrated snarl he hangs his legs over the edge of the bed and gets to his feet, paces his bedroom a few minutes before stepping into a pair of jeans and his ratty old Adidas. He’d use the front door if he didn’t think it would wake up Sandor, so Bronn simply eases out his first story bedroom window, landing easily onto the gravel driveway that dead ends by his room here at the southern end of the house.

“Hey lady,” he says when Penny pokes her sleepy head out of her stall, and he sweeps his hand across her forelock before giving her a scratch behind the ears, and there is a jealous whicker and snort in the next stall over. His gelding Nugget sticks his nose in their business, his soft velvet lip an impatient push against the side of Bronn’s head, over and over again, making him laugh,  push, push, push until he transfers his affections to the young palomino. “Restless too, I see. Although probably for different reasons, huh, buddy,” and even though he’s got to get up early tomorrow Bronn finds himself walking over to the wall of tack on the far end of the barn. He pulls down the bridle and returns to his palomino, slides the bit in his mouth with slow-slide  practiced ease, and once they’re out in the moonlit yard he hauls himself up onto his back, adjusting himself appropriately until he’s comfortable here on his horse’s bare back. “Let’s blow off some steam, huh?”

The moon is so full and fat with light that it’s like God is shining a huge flashlight down on the earth, and he can see the world before him as clear as day while they pick their way across his father’s acreage. It’s a world of rippling grass and rustling oak trees standing regal and tall along the wash lines that streak here and there across the land. Nugget, painted silver in the moonlight, snorts at the far off sound of coyotes yipping and yapping at each other, worked up over their nocturnal business, and Bronn gives him a reassuring pat on the smooth, warm curve of his neck.

_‘Older guy, singular.’_

_Me?_

Bronn shivers despite himself.

It makes sense, really, considering how hard it is for him to get his mind off of her even after only being around her the two times. It makes sense when he thinks about it because he is still so confused, so sure but _un_ sure about what she meant with that saucy little line, giving him a lesson in grammar or English or whatever, plural versus singular, giving him a conundrum of Renly versus himself. It makes sense but it’s still a surprise when he realizes after a long stretch of musing over her that he’s halfway to Highgarden. Bronn laughs, a small thing out here between the bleached sprawl of plains and the huge black swath of sky, and he kicks and clucks Nugget into a lope, squeezing his legs hard to keep from bouncing too hard on his nuts, because if he’s going to see her he better make it quick, before he’s lost too much of this strange, restless night that has given him this boldness, this gumption, this absolute surrender.

 

 _I’ll tell mom to buy wine for Willas’s graduation dinner,_ she thinks sleepily as she drowses in bed on her stomach, _and I’ll tell her Loras and I want to see Storm’s End vineyard so she doesn’t order it from Sunspear._ Margaery smiles into her pillow, imagining a long, burning look between Renly and her brother, a slow handshake of lingering touches that reminds her of Bronn, how he helped her save face after Sandor’s snub. His hand was calloused and dry, a working man’s hand, and she felt even more soft and feminine as a result of it, and she is wondering how sweet her dreams are going to be when there is a sound outside her window. No, _on_ her window, the world’s smallest firework, and then she realizes things are being thrown against it.

She’s thinking Loras is pulling a prank on her when she yanks the lace curtain to the side, but she sucks in a breath when she sees it’s _him,_ it’s Bronn, standing on the patio between the house and the pool, and she is breathless to think he’s come all this way to see her.  The underwater light has him backlit with a bluesy green but she can tell it’s him by the light of the moon, by the shape of his shoulders and the sandiness of his hair. He chucks a handful of pebbles to the side and they land in the grass in silence, and he brushes his hands off on the seat of his jeans.

“Why are you always waking me up?” she says in a stage whisper once she’s pushed up her window, leaning over to rest her folded forearms on the sill and hang her head out, but where she means to snap at him she can only smile. _He’s here,_ _he’s here, he’s here._

“What did you mean earlier today, huh, pipsqueak? All that not plural, singular stuff?” He folds his arms across his chest as he looks up at her, and if she thought her heart was racing before, it certainly is now. She’s been a cloud nine strut around the house all evening, barely made it through her homework she was so giddy from her success, and now she’s lightheaded from the rush of adrenaline his questions give her.

“Hang on,” she says, and she pushes herself away from the window and hurries to her dresser, pulling on a pair of gym shorts under her short nightgown, and then she’s doing what she’s done only twice before, straddling the window to find her footing on the trellis below her window, using her big toe to gain purchase before swinging her left leg over the sill to follow suit, wincing as the unfinished wood bites into the tender skin of her feet.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he whispers when she’s halfway down, and she’s grateful she’s on the shorter side, the littler side, because she has to take her time and the structure creaks and groans under the addition of her weight, and before she knows it she’s got splinters in her toes and the palm of her right hand.

“Ouch,” she says when she jumps down, skipping the last few feet of trellis, because even though she lands in the soft soil it still drives the splinters deeper into her skin, and she’s limping by the time she turns and walks to where he’s standing, a solitary figure drowning in a sea of moonlight.

“What’d you go and do _that_ for,” he says, though he looks as amused as he does exasperated, and he returns the grin she gives him. “I figured you’d just sneak downstairs or something.”

“My mom’s a super light sleeper and I’d have to walk past my parents’ bedroom,” and when he suggests saying she just had to go to the bathroom, she tells him she has her own bathroom and he says _Of course you do._ She takes a step and winces, takes another and says _Ow_ and he stops her with the edge of his palm to her arm and a squint down at her.

“What’s wrong, you pull a muscle or something with that little stunt of yours?” he asks, and despite the flippancy he seems sincerely interested. She shrugs, trying to be aloof even though her palm and toes are throbbing.

“I think I got some splinters,” she says with a backwards point over her shoulder to the trellis behind her, and he chuckles with a shake of his head.

“Come here,” he says, and he walks towards the back porch light, the tread of his skater shoes silent on the flagstone, and she’s grateful for it because they’re dangerously close to the house. He sits down on the ground, gesturing for her to follow suit, and once she does he pulls one of her feet onto his lap. It’s intimate and familiar, so casual you’d think he’s had her leg in his hands a thousand times before. There’s those callouses she remembers, a rough rub of fingerprints against her skin that make her want to shiver and shake every time they sweep her over. She thinks of fireflies, that one time she saw them on vacation in Savannah, she thinks of soda pop bubbles fizzing at the surface of her glass, and it’s those lovely light feelings that are filling her like a hive with honey.

 “Let’s see here, now,” he murmurs, more to her foot than to her, and then he’s leaning back to dig something out of his pocket, and with a low _Ah_ he pulls out a Swiss army knife.

“Oh my God are you going to _cut_ them out?” she asks with no small amount of terror, because she’s not a fan of needles or knives, but he just gusts out a quiet laugh and shakes his head. Bronn pulls a small pair of tweezers from the rounded end of the knife, and she lets go of her breath with relief. “Oh, right,” she says, feeling stupid, and then she gets to watch him as he bows his head over her foot, her toes stretched back so he can see the splinters. Margaery bites her lip to feel his fingers on the top of her foot, his left thumb a firm press in the arch of her foot to keep it in position as he tweezes first one and then the two splinters from just beneath the pad of her big toe.

“So,” he says conversationally, flicking his gaze up at her a moment before returning his attention to the task literally at hand, and when he’s done with her right foot she pulls it from his lap, wordlessly replacing it with her left. “What did you mean, Margie? What you said earlier hmm?” he says.

“Um,” she says, and she winces when the tweezers nip her skin instead of the splinter, and he says _Sorry_ as she tries to figure out what to say. Margaery leans back with her left hand braced against the flagstone to support her weight, and she chews her lip as she watches him. “I meant what I said,” and it’s _Oh God, oh God, it’s so much easier to admit when you get to run away right afterwards,_ but it would be a slow retreat back up the trellis, and she is stuck here now., stuck with him and her truths.

“And what did you say, exactly? Without your fancy words and ways to not say it, this time,” he says, patting the top of her foot once he’s done, and she folds her legs beneath her and sits forward, leans in to him as she offers him the hand with the splinter in it. He takes it without question, mirrors her sitting position to hunch over her hand, his thumb a sweep across her palm to find the culprit, and she feels a tingle run up her spine, a flare of heat in her belly that she’s only ever felt a handful of times. She is butterflies and nectar, hummingbirds and honey here in this moment with his touch on her and his question flying above them like a kite in the sky.

“I um, I said, you know,” she stammers. _Oh God, oh God, oh crap, oh shit._ Margaery takes a long, lung-stretching breath of air and releases it, slow like a leaky balloon. “IsaidIlikeyou,” she says, her words a rush, crowded together like pearls on a string. She can see the muscles of his throat work as he swallows, but he says nothing about what she just admitted, just goes about digging out the splinters one by one, and when he’s finished she’s wishing there were more, because his fingers move away from her and her hand is left in its lonely hover between them. She drops it to her lap.

“All patched up,” he says, tucking the tweezers back in the knife as he stands, and she scrambles to her feet after him, heart in her throat. Suddenly it feels a lot hotter out here, here where she’s admitted to a man that she’s got a crush on him, here where he’s taken that information and done _something_ with it, something he’s not telling her. He walks away from her to the side yard, whistling low like a mourning dove, and she gasps when she hears the snort of a horse, sees it plodding through the lawn towards them, and it’s like a sort of dream,  the vision of his horse, a pale silvery unicorn that stepped off a star to touch down on earth at the whim of his whistle.

“You _rode_ here?” she asks breathlessly, hugging herself despite the heat in her skin, the flush of blood and pulse that comes with telling vulnerable truths.

“Yeah, I did,” he says, turning towards her with a sudden twist of his body. The moonlight that paints his horse like a fairy tale shows the confliction of expressions on his face, and it is the most serious she’s ever seen him. _I’ve only ever seen him twice._ “I didn’t realize it ‘til halfway, though. I don’t- I shouldn’t have come. And _you_ shouldn’t have _said_ that to me, not then and not now,” he says sharply, wagging his finger in her face. She wants to grab in her fist. “You can’t say- You can’t feel- I mean, exactly how _old_ are you? For the love of God, please tell me you just look young for your age or something.”

“I’m fifteen,” she says after a moment’s hesitation, and he flings his head back as he presses his palms to his eyes, walks away past where his horse stands and grazes, groaning _Jesus Christ_ to the night sky. His hands scrub his face and he turns back to her.

“Margie, what the hell,” he says, “you’re _fifteen_? I’m standing around at midnight with a fifteen year old in a flimsy nightgown. _Fifteen_ ,” he repeats with a shake of his head, and she lifts her chin, is relieved she didn’t tell him her birthday was a scant two weeks ago.

“Yeah well, so what? _You_ rode a freaking horse over here, so obviously you- you like me too. Don’t you?” Her heart _hurts_ when he shakes his head, but then he sighs, rubbing his thumb on his forehead.

“Yeah. I do. Lord knows I shouldn’t but I do,” he says. “I can’t get you out of my mind. I shouldn’t even _say_ shit like that to you, though. I probably shouldn’t even say ‘shit’ in front of you,” and that makes her laugh.

“I say ‘shit’ plenty. I’m not a little kid, okay? I may be a teenager but I’m not a baby, all right?” She steps towards him, the manicured grass of her backyard a cool comfort to her bare feet. “What’s so bad about liking me?”

“Because I’m twenty, Margie, I’m twenty and you’re fifteen. That’s a big damn difference, especially when I’m on this side of eighteen and you’re on the other,” and he sighs. “Goddammit. Sandor was right.” She huffs at that, thinks she could give Sandor a piece of her mind for talking about her, and she sits down in the grass with her back to Bronn, worried he’s going to hop on his horse and ride away under the moon and the stars, but there is the rustle of grass beside her as he sits with a sigh, knees bent and his arms looped around them. She wonders if it’s too forward to rest her head against his shoulder, knows it is, wants to do it anyways. The grass is a tickle under her bare legs so she draws them up, hugs them to her chest in a girly interpretation of his posture.

“So does that mean you’re not going to kiss me?” she teases, and he chuckles sadly, letting his head drop forward

“I can’t kiss you, Margie. I’d probably get arrested,” he says. They are quiet several moments, watching as his horse bites the grass, the reins a drag on the lawn as he noses here and there but never wanders far. She sighs before releasing her grip around her knees and flopping back onto the grass, and it’s a cool prickle through the cotton of her gown, makes her think of the ticklish, tingly way he makes her feel.

Wordlessly he follows suit, his back a curve until he’s lying beside her, and together they look up at the spray of stars that are somewhat dimmed by the brilliance and dazzle of the moon. It’s a magical moon, here with the cool breezes and this man beside her, the man who puts butterflies in her stomach and fills her mouth with laughter, with his pretty horse an ethereal glow of white mane and palomino gold. It’s a magical moment but also a sad one, because he likes her but he’s not going to do anything about it, and that reminds her.

“Well if you can’t kiss me then why did you come all the way out here? What’s the point?” He turns away from the stars to look at her, and there’s flattery there, she thinks, to turn from such celestial loveliness simply to look her way.

“Because I couldn’t help myself,” he murmurs with a small moonlit smile, and she supposes that if she can’t have his kisses she will have to content herself with that.

 

He lingers as long as he dares, lying in the grass beside her as they talk, trying not to think about the little nightie thing she’s in, those shorts he could see as she climbed down the trellis bold as brass, crushing star jasmine between her toes, sending to the sky its heady aroma, intoxicating him as if he wasn’t already half drunk on the cocktail of feelings he has for her. He tells her about his dad and about Sandor living with them. She tells him about her older brother, the college grad Willas and he groans with a laugh because he went to high school with him, and he wonders how deep it is, the shit he’s gotten himself into.

“And then there’s Loras,” she says with a smile, glancing at him a moment before looking back up at the sky.  “He’s the reason I asked you about Renly,” and Bronn laughs.

“So you and your brother _both_ have a thing for older guys then,” he says, and she doesn’t bother tamping down her laughter.

“I guess so,” she says, and he closes his eyes when she says it’s because they have such good taste. “I’m thinking of throwing Willas a party for when he comes home after graduation and inviting Renly since he was in Willas’s class at Buena,” she says, and he’s at least relieved that he was two grades lower than them, because if he were any older it would make this, this _thing_ between them beyond inappropriate. He isn’t quite sure this itself isn’t wildly out of line.

“Pretty sweet of you, playing matchmaker for your brother,” he says, and she shrugs, her shoulders a light rub against the grass.

“He’s my brother, you know? I want him to be happy. He’s, you know, he’s just really sad, I think, deep down. Not being about to admit the truth to anyone. I keep telling him to tell mom and dad but he’s too scared. Anyways, I think it’s going to be a pool party, for Loras. Well, for Willas, really, but what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. You and Sandor should come,” she says, and he grits his teeth at the idea of little miss Margie running around in a bikini.

She asks about his mom and he tells her how she split when he was seven, that it’s been him and his old man, the two of them alone until Sandor moved in five years ago. She tells him about her parents, together since college and affectionate with one another, though it’s more the comfort of familiarity these days than it is the wild passion of love, and he laughs when she says her father has kind of let himself go.

“I gotta go,” he says finally, because it feels late and they’re both yawning, but he lingers down here in the grass when she sits up and looks back at him, and he wants to brush the blades of grass off her back, thinks about giving one of those blonde tumbles a tug, but she is _fifteen years old_ and there is no way he can lay a hand on her in good conscience. No matter how innocent the touch he knows the underlying reasons behind any excuse he could muster up, and so he clenches his jaw against the urge and resists the pull of her.

“Are you going to come back?” she is yearning and hope and a little sorrow, all the things he feels himself, but he smiles at the wistful way she’s looking at him. Bronn considers this moment, this question of hers, picks it up and examines it for what it is: a point of no return. He can say no and wash his hands of this, can walk away and try and drown his misery in beer and work and other women. He can be free of this with just one tiny little word, one firm _No._

“Yeah,” he says, feeling giddy and nervous, thrilled and doomed all at once, wondering if this is how all men feel around that one specific girl. She asks if he can come every Saturday night, and against his better judgment he’s nodding and telling her yes, and then they’re penciling midnight stargazing sessions into their lives. “Just as friends, though, Margie,” he warns, and she looks at him over her shoulder as she finds her first foothold in the trellis, and there is a sparkle in her eyes that he can see from here.

“Sure, Bronny,” she says with a smile and a toss of hair over her shoulder as she looks away from him, gazing up at the trellis above her. “Just as friends,” and he thinks he’s very likely screwed, and not in the good way, either.

 _Fifteen,_ he thinks with a shake of his head, guiding Nugget across his dad’s field towards the barn. _Friends,_ he thinks with a roll of his eyes as he closes the stall door and rehangs the bridle on the tack wall. _Twenty year men shouldn’t be making friends with fifteen year old girls,_ he thinks as he crawls back into his bedroom, collapsing fully clothed on the bed when he sees it’s almost three in the morning _. Friends don’t look at each other the way she looks at me, the way I know I’m looking at her,_ and he falls asleep with Sandor’s snarky dig rolling around in his head, how he looks at Margie like a Christmas tree, and he dreams of mistletoe and kisses that will never happen unless it’s here in the space of his dreams and his thoughts.

He walks into his dad’s bedroom after he wakes up the next morning to Sandor’s traditional flick of the light, feeling almost hungover from the late night and the torment, from a night full of dreams that made him wake up feeling like a filthy son of a bitch. His dad’s is a room he hasn’t stepped foot in since he used to sleep here near on every night, tear-streaked and desolate after his mother beat her hot retreat, and it feels almost like a museum because it’s exactly as he remembers it.

It’s tidy and probably the most masculine room he’s ever seen; cowboy boots a leather slump against the wall, a mirror above the dresser upon which a solitary boar bristle brush rests. There’s his bed and his nightstand, a half full ashtray and a lamp and a clock. There’s the window he’s never bothered to cover, though he’s sleeping later and later past sunrise these days, and then there’s the antique rocking chair in the corner, the one his mother nursed him in about a hundred years ago. Jonn looks up with surprise from where he’s sitting, chicken legs swung over the edge of the bed, cigarette in one hand while he scratches his concave belly with the other, but there’s no guard up or irritation at Bronn’s unannounced entry into this private sanctum of his. He’s grateful for his father’s low ripple way of parenting, his _Well, all right_ and his _Sure, son,_ his _Don’t be a moron_ and _Think that through, now,_ and it’s all of those sentiments that are pulling him into this lair.

“Morning,” he says, briefly considering sitting in the rocking chair, but his dad’s back is aimed towards it and so instead he sits on the floor, resting his back against the dresser so he can face his father. If Jonn has questions as to why his son is suddenly in his room he doesn’t ask them; it’s not like he’s ventured down the hall to Bronn’s room in the past five or six years. They’ve given each other love but also respect and privacy, so he’s grateful he’s not getting a sour look this early on a weekday.

“Who died?” his father asks, and Bronn laughs because he supposes it’s that unusual a sight, for his dad to see him here in his room. He shakes his head in the negative and his father nods with a relieved sigh, taking another drag before stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray by his bed.

“What do you do if you want someo- if you want something you don’t think you should have?” And it’s cutting to the chase and ignoring preamble, it’s tossing away the meat to find the wishbone, because Bronn is _wishing_ , now. Bronn is hoping, knowing full well how dangerous _that_ is.

“Depends,” his father says after a few moments’ thought, a salted sandy-haired shrug as he rests his hands on the caps of his knees. “Now, if it’s money, I got no choice but to advise you against it, because that sounds an awful lot like stealing,” he says, looking under his brows at his son, and Bronn quickly shakes his head no.

“Nope, not at all, dad, you know me better than that,” he says. He’d love to sit on fifty grand like Sandor but at the same time he knows he’d abuse it. Bronn knows he’s better off poor.

“Okay, then, what is it?” Jonn looks at him, and his leathered and weathered face is near on gray in this early morning light, though the smell of coffee wafting down the hall seems to perk him up, and he gazes down at Bronn with open, albeit polite, interest. _Wants to help, refuses to pry. Let me sleep next to him for years and never asked why when I all of a sudden moved to my own room._

“Love,” Bronn says after a while. “A wo- a girl,” he says, shaking his head, because there’s no possible way he can refer to her as a woman. He’s barely a man and he’s five years her senior.

“Ah,” his dad says. “Affairs of the heart, huh?” Jonn’s smile is scruffy and tired, is all memory and pain and that sliver of hope that’s never quite left his eyes, even though his wife left him on a winter afternoon when she claimed she’d be back in time for dinner.

“Yeah,” Bronn says. “How do- how do you know if it’s a bad idea? How can you tell if it’s worth the pain? What if you have to wait, is it worth it?”

 “You’re more than likely asking the wrong man about this, son, all things considered,” he says, slow and steady as he picks his words, careful the way Sandor picks plants. “But do _you_ think she’s worth it?”

“Yes,” Bronn says without hesitation. “It’s just going to take so long. Like, years long,” he says, and Jonn chuckles until he coughs, coughs until he hacks. _My old man’s gotta cut it back one of these days,_ he thinks, but then Jonn quiets, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and smiles. It’s a sad thing.

“Well, in the end, I guess it didn’t really work out for me,” he says after a while. “I worked too much and took too long to realize it, I suppose,” but Bronn still thinks that’s a shitty reason to abandon a family. “But, I will say this,” his dad says as he stands with a grunt of effort ill proportioned to his size, skinny as he is. “I still think she’s worth it, even though she bailed. I loved her and I always will. So if you like this _girl_ of yours, then sure. Sure, son, she’s worth it. All desserts are worth slogging through the dinner for, right?”

It’s exactly the advice Bronn doesn’t want.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/106626203443/one-fine-summer-chapter-4-feels)

It’s been a summer of stars at midnight, of wash parties and sleepovers and roses, and as August comes to a close it’s become a summer of afternoon monsoons and  _pining._  She runs to the bedroom window like a lovesick fool every morning she hears a lawn mower roar to life, and he’s taken to doffing his baseball cap whenever he catches her, and Bronn  _always_  catches her. There was one terrifyingly comical moment when it was Sandor there instead, and he glared up at her in anticipation of her and Bronn’s little ritual until she stuck her tongue out at him and waggled her hands on either side of her head, and for the first time in the four months she’s known him he actually laughed at her.

It’s a summer of learning, of how to water and feed and to avoid thorns, and Bronn tells her about coffee grounds and banana peels, about deadheading and pruning. He teaches her and he keeps his distance when the sun is up, is all laughter and jokes, wise cracks about Sandor and her that make her laugh so hard tears spring to her eyes. While he has not touched her since he pulled the splinters from her skin he is still close, painfully close, whenever he rides up on Nugget at midnight and wordlessly comes to lie beside her where she’s waiting. It is static electricity, a crackle and a dazzle of tension between them, almost makes the fine hairs on her arms stand up when they look up at the sky together as they talk.

Margie knows him well now, how he’s got plans to do what he’s doing for the rest of his life, how he isn’t going anywhere and how that suits him just fine, how his dad smokes too much and coughs too much, how he airs out his t-shirts on the line in their backyard to get rid of the cigarette smell. He is sad for his friend Sandor and hopes he saves up the money to buy Barristan’s property. And he pretends they are just friends but she catches the way he looks at her, and it’s like being dropped into melted chocolate, warm and sweet and overwhelming, it makes her antsy and impatient, and she wills herself to wake up and be twenty years old in the morning, but always she is just fifteen.  _Fifteen,_  he said that first night, and it was the sound of breaking hearts, the way that number fell out of his mouth.

A summer of pining, which is why she’s sitting here at Meredyth’s house in town, staring at the gray cordless phone that rests on the creamy froth of her girlish bedding between them, waiting for Elinor’s call, for her cousin to say yes, Renly’s left the convenience store and is on his way home. It’s a summer of pining, but she and Bronn don’t have the rights to it all by themselves, her brother Loras has been a sullen mope around the house ever since Willas’s pool party back in May. Renly did show up, and Renly swam and so did Loras, but her brother’s nerve ran out despite how late Renly stayed, drinking beers and laughing in the pool with Willas. Margie refuses to let the summer close on  _two_  unstarts of love and so she enlisted the help of her cousin and friends, whispered Loras’s secret to them one night over popcorn and Pepsi and pinky swears, and so it’s been three little detectives, three little stalkers in the small world of Sonoita. Renly hasn’t a clue and Loras is as depressed as ever, but  _Today,_  Margie vows,  _today he’s going to get the guy._

They’re biting their nails when the phone rings, and both girls squeal and jump at the metallic sound, and then laugh as Margie snatches the phone and answers it.

“The eagle has landed,” Elinor whispers, and Margie can hear the tinkle of chimes that are tied to the front door. She rolls her eyes as she hops off of Meredyth’s bed and slips her feet back into her worn out Tretorns.

“It’s the eagle has flown, silly,” she says with an amused shake of her head. “We’re on our way now, thanks Ellie,” and she clicks off and tosses the phone back to the bed. “Come on, we better hurry, he drives like a speed demon,” and they’re off like two shots to the little Toyota her friend got for her sweet sixteen, barreling down the 82 to where Renly lives, just a mile away from Meredyth’s place.

“And you’re sure about this,” Meredyth says, waving and grinning to cutie-patootie Jaime Lannister as he drives past, mister varsity football with the golden hair, and then she’s slowing to a stop by Renly’s mailbox.  “You haven’t even come up with a good reason to just be like, wandering the streets by yourself,” and Margie has to laugh at that, at how it sounds like she’ll be creeping around some sketchy neighborhood in downtown LA or something.  She shrugs as she gets out of the car, leans in with her forearms folded on the rolled down window.

“I’ll tell him, I don’t know, my horse ran away. Or that I went for a walk and hurt my ankle. I can do a very convincing limp,” she says with a grin, thinking back to how she got out of gym class one afternoon.

“But Marga- I mean, Margie, it’s after 3pm, you  _know_  it’s going to rain,” she says, speaking of the clockwork way monsoon storms tend to roll in, how every day from June to August it’s a sticky, humid buildup of clouds on the southern horizon, chugging up from the sea of Cortez in Mexico to bring them their rains. But they’ve also been in a drought the past few years and half the time the clouds tumble up on top of one another, big gray menacing things that hover like big bullies too chicken to end up doing anything except talk a big game. So she shrugs again.

“It hasn’t rained in like three days, it’ll be fine. And if it does it will probably only sprinkle, and think about how  _sad_  that will be! He’ll have no choice but pick me up and take me home, and I’ll be all Scarlett O’Hara,” she says, pressing a hand to her chest and batting her lashes, making Meredyth laugh, “begging him to stay for dinner because I am just so  _grateful_  for the rescue. Now get out of here before he drives up and catches us plotting,” she says, straightening up and waving when Meredyth makes a U-turn and heads back home.

It’s a nice afternoon even with the humidity, the wind ever present as always and cooling to the skin, pulling on the spaghetti straps of her sundress and lifting the hair off the back of her neck. She’s grinning as she walks back and forth in front of Renly’s winding driveway, waiting for him to come driving up, and she hugs herself with a wicked sense of pride, because after weeks of plotting she’s got it all figured out, and there’s no way for Renly to escape her clutches now, and there’s no way he can sit across from her brother Loras at the dining room table and  _not_  fall in love with him. The summer of pining and wanting and never having will become the summer of love,  _Come hell or high water,_  she says, and that’s when the first fork of lightning strikes the earth.

 

Bronn and Sandor both say _Shit_ when the rain comes because they are in the middle of Selwyn’s sprawling acreage, pulling ash tree saplings out of his pastures without any protection from the lightning. In mere minutes they’re soaked through, and he can feel the rain running in cold rivulets down the small of his back to collect on the waist of his jeans, and his baseball hat is a heavy cap of _wet_ on his head.

“If he’d let some of these trees grow then maybe we’d have some cover,” Sandor snaps, his chin length hair plastered to his face and in his eyes as it goes from dry to drenched in a matter of moments. The last time Mr. Tarth called them out to pull trees he vowed he’d save them all so they’ve been meticulously, carefully spading them up and wrapping the root bases in burlap and twine. Trees are all well and good but Bronn wagers if they’d just yanked the damned things out they’d be done by now, and would be sitting in the truck, warm and dry like towels fresh out of the dryer.

“But then it wouldn’t be a pasture,” Bronn says, to which his friend says _Whatever,_ and he squints up at the sky, blinking against the onslaught of rain before tossing his spade to the ground and standing. “We should get out of here, man, we could get struck,” he says with a sigh, gazing at Sandor as he resolutely goes to dig out another sapling, but there is another streak of lightning with an almost instantaneous boom of thunder on its heels, so close it could get stepped on. Sandor immediately stands with another string of expletives as he holds the bundle of seven or eight trees to his chest.

“Come on, let’s get up to the stables, we can wait it out there,” Sandor says, turning to head for the tree line that marks the edge of the pasture and leads all the way up to the stables and big house on top of the slope, but Bronn shakes his head and says he can’t. Sandor turns to look at him over his shoulder, and if he’s surly looking when he’s dry as a bone he’s an absolute menace when he’s wet and pissed off.

 “I gotta let the dogs in,” he says, because his father works six days a week and today isn’t Sunday. “They’ll be miserable, plus I can get us dry clothes,” he says, and Sandor shrugs, digs in his pockets for the truck keys, a soaked-jeans difficulty with his huge hands, and tosses them to Bronn. He jogs across the field in the opposite direction to the two tire tracks that run from stable to road between the two pastures, and he mutters to himself as he wrings out his baseball hat before throwing it in the footwell of the cab. His boots are a squelch and suck on the dirt road that has turned to mud, and he hopes Sandor doesn’t bitch about mess in his truck because it’s not like he can help it.

It’s hard not to shiver from the cold wet of his shirt and jeans, even here in the still warmth of the cab, and he feels like a drowned rat as he pulls onto the 82, feels like the only man on the planet here in this small, gray-lit space. The rain coming down is like a wall of water on all sides, it’s a hammer and drum of noise on the roof of the cab that isolates and closes him off and he has to blast the radio just to hear it over the racket. He’s thinking of the poor dumb dogs without even his dad’s truck to cower under when he sees a girl on the side of the road. Stupidly he turns down the radio as if it would help him see her better, leans over the seat as he slows to a stop beside her. _Of all the fuckin’ luck,_ he thinks with a grin, because he means good and bad luck when he sees the girl is Margie, because he’s happy to see her even though she’s nothing but trouble for him. Bronn completes the lean to open the passenger side door when he’s fully stopped, and once she sees it’s him she is a sprint and burst through the rain, a little water fairy skipping over puddles and dodging raindrops.

“Do I even want to know what you’re doing out here in the middle of bumfuck during a monsoon?” he says once she’s hopped up into the cab, using her whole body to yank shut the door, and he feels the swing of her wet hair against his shoulder as she leans in and slams it with a grunt the size of a kitten. Margie swipes at her cheeks with hands as wet as her face, her teeth a chatter, her eye makeup a mess, and he thinks it might be the cutest he’s ever seen her. The urge to pull her in against his side is immense, unbearable, a cruel reminder of the five things between them, five little packages of 365 days wrapped in ribbon, five flickering little birthday candles that chill rather than warm him. So he grits his teeth and puts the truck into gear and slowly accelerates so they’re not sitting ducks on a road half-blinded in the storm.

“I was w-w-waiting for Reh-Renly,” she says finally. “Oh God, it’s so f-freaking cold,” and no wonder because while he’s chilled in his t-shirt and jeans she’s wearing nothing but a flimsy little sundress and a pair of tennis shoes.

“And what exactly were you going to do to poor Renly? Invite yourself over to drip all over his floors?” and he laughs when he spares a glance away from the road to see her glaring at him. _All fire, even half drowned as she is._

“I was going to get him to give me a ride back home,” she huffs, rubbing her arms to try and get some warmth in them.

“Oh shit, sorry, here, let me,” he says, flipping the A/C to heat and turning it on full blast, both vents aimed her way, and in a quick second he’s sweating through the rainwater on his skin and in his clothes, but her teeth finally stop chattering. A worthy trade, and he relaxes somewhat as she tells him her little scheme to get Renly over to her house so he can fall ass over tea kettle for her brother, and he laughs.

“You sure do have a head for schemes on those shoulders of yours, don’t you,” he says, and she grins and shrugs because there’s no point in lying, when it comes to them. He’s learned plenty about her over the span of the summer, lying side by side under a blanket of stars and a bed sheet of breezes, and he supposes it is a sort of pillow talk with their heads in the soft of manicured grass. He knows all about how she wants to be a photographer, thought she wanted to be a supermodel more but knows now it’s all about photographs, ever since Willas bought her a fancy camera for her birthday. He doesn’t know much about it but he thought her pictures were good, said as much when she crawled down out of her room with a bunch of them shoved in the back pocket of her cutoff shorts. He knows she never wants to farm and wants to go places, to not be so tied down to the land, and the thought of a Sonoita without her is a sad one.

“So why don’t you just _tell_ Renly your brother likes him? These games and plots, this isn’t really how men work, I don’t care what team you play for. Tell him so he at least knows, and then is informed enough to make a decision,” Bronn says with a shrug, his wet shirt a tight suck on his skin. Margie gapes at him.

“I could _never,_ ” she says. “Oh my God, like I can just walk up to Renly Baratheon and be like ‘so I know you’re gay and my brother is gay and he’s totally into you, just FYI,’” she says with a scoffing laugh.

“I don’t see why not, just be honest and put it out there,” but he falls quiet when she eyes him and says _And look how well that worked the last time I did it._ The rain beats down all around the truck, fills the silence for them, makes the air all the heavier after a bold as brass statement as that. She is indefatigable, she is exasperation itself, she’s body-buzzing and honey, a whip-crack and a smile. Bronn broods.

“This isn’t the way to my house,” she says finally once he turns off of the 82, and she peers out at the rain as if it could tell her anything, glances at him with confusion.

“That’s because it’s not,” he says, swinging the truck into the gravelly bog of his driveway. “It’s the way to mine. I gotta let our dogs in,” he says and he rolls his eyes with a grin at her little gasp of surprise and the big smile that brightens her face. He’s thought about bringing her over sometimes, wonders what she’d think of the humble house his father bought back in the seventies, small and yet somehow still so unaffordable. He’s thought about it and dismissed it, because it’s nothing like her fancy backyard they hang out in, nothing like stars and pool lights and the smell of roses on the air. It’s horseshit on the metal boot scraper outside and cigarette stains on the walls, it’s three men living solitary lives under one roof, lives that never quite seem to connect to the others no matter how many meals they share in front of the old TV.

“I’ve always wanted to see where you live,” she says as he kills the engine, and he’d love to linger here in the warm headiness of the cab with her, with the drum of rain that seems a little less hateful now, a little more rich with life and lit up with energy, but there are four miserable dogs huddled together under the infinitesimal square of cover over the front door.

“Come on, Margie, let’s get those critters inside and get you a dry shirt or something,” he says before opening the door and stepping back into the storm, jogging around the front of the car to open her door, and then they’re both a splash and crunch in the soupy gravel, and he kicks open the gate to the enclosed front yard, fumbles with the keys before letting them in, a rush of four sopping wet dogs on the wood floors as they scramble inside to slip on linoleum and crash into cabinets as they head into kitchen. Her entry into his home is far quieter and far heavier because it means she’s stepping even deeper into his life, and he’s a wince waiting to happen as he watches her take it all in.

There’s Sandor’s old couch and a lazy boy around a huge old TV set, a coffee table with four legs that have all been gnawed on by a dog, there’s a few family photos and a picture of his dad standing between him and Sandor on the day they graduated, and a pothos plant on a stand in the corner that’s been around longer than he can remember.

“Now _this_ is a bachelor pad,” she says with a chuckle, and he rolls his eyes as he leads the way down the hall and to his room, shouting _Girl in the house, girl in the house, hide yourselves_ the whole time, and he grins to hear her laugh. His room is nothing much to look at either, though it’s busier than his father’s. It’s a double bed and a dresser, a small bookcase full of every volume of the Dragonlance series and about twenty video games, a bunch of X-Men comic books still in their clear plastic sleeves, and a dresser with a few baseball hats on it and a book about how to care for roses. When she walks fully into the room he shoves the book off the dresser and into his dirty clothes hamper so she won’t see it.

“And _this_ is definitely a guy’s room,” she says, a shiver all over again in the cool quiet of the house, and he opens a few dresser drawers to stare at his clothes a moment before pulling out and tossing an old sweatshirt and a pair of track pants on the bed. “Thank you,” she says, and is seconds from picking it up before turning towards him. “Do you have a towel I could use? Sorry,” she murmurs, and he starts and nods, heads to the bathroom for what she asks him for. He’s soaked, he can see it in the mirror and how his hair has turned brown from the darkening drench of rain, and the towels hanging on the bars along the wall across from the toilet are welcoming enough that he’s peeling off his t-shirt and throwing it in the tub with a wet slopping sound, is ruffling his hair with a hand towel as he walks another one into his room for her.

She’s kicked off her shoes and stands damp and barefoot in his room, dress a wet flag clinging all right and all wrong to her skin, a rain-sticky cling to her thighs, a strap half slid down her arm. She hugs herself for warmth as she gazes around, and he wants so desperately to be the source of warmth, to pull her in and heat her up. It is a thrill and a spike of arousal to have her here in his room, here where he’s thought of her and dreamed of her, where’s he’s done far worse than just _think_ , and it is also trouble. When she turns to look at him her jaw drops open half a moment before snapping shut, and now she’s looking at him the way he’s looking at her with the towel still pressed against his wet hair. If his father was home and lit a cigarette, Bronn thinks the air itself between them would catch fire.

“Thanks,” she says when he hands the larger bath towel to her, and she wraps it around her shoulders like a shawl, and they are standing there staring at each other, he’s standing there watching the rain drip from the ends of her hair onto the carpet below, watching the rise of goose bumps under the weight of his gaze. It is like he is stuck between two ticks of the second hand on a watch when she steps towards him, the faded carpet a silent crush beneath her feet. He sucks in a breath when she lifts and rests a hand on his bare chest, and it’s impossible, letting that breath out. It clings like a burr to the back of his throat and makes him close his eyes against the dizzying hum in his brain.

“You’re killing me, Margie,” he says, voice tight like reins on a runaway horse, and when he opens his eyes she’s _here,_ right here with him, her face a parted-lip tilt up towards his. Rain patters on the low roof above them, streaks the window glass with late summer tears, and the scent of creosote fills his room. He wonders if it’s from her, if that clean rain smell of the desert is in her hair. He wants so badly to touch her back, to cup her face and kiss her, to tell her how thick his blood runs for her, and the towel in his hand falls to the floor when he moves towards her.

 

Bronn’s fingertip is a drift against the towel she’s clutching to her chest with one hand, and his chest is a tingle of chill and warmth beneath her palm. She knows the cold is from the rain but she hopes the heat is because of her, because it _has_ to be, because it is the first time they have made contact in three months. And it’s a simple contact to be sure; she’s gone further than just a touch here or there with boys, has had one or two hot and heavy makeout sessions on the outskirts of a bonfire party with Ned Dayne, his hands a fumbling mess under her shirt. But there is no liquor-fueled fumble here, just the press of her hand to him, and his heart beats like a warm drum, a call to arms that she answers by lifting to the tips of her toes, bringing her mouth to his.

“Jesus,” he says, and she watches his mouth form the word as both of his hands lift to grip the edges of towel around her as if they were lapels, and he yanks so hard on them it makes her gasp, and she marvels at the power they both seem to have in their hands, in the press of a palm and the grip of terry cloth. She can feel his breath on her mouth, the bridge of her nose, and when she risks a glance up at his eyes he is waiting for her, a nice long look that makes her go _Oh_. “Such a nice view,” he murmurs, but then his hands are gone from the towel, and he’s gone from her, two steps back that leave her palm holding nothing, and she feels like empty sails, to have been so full of his presence, to have it so abruptly taken from her.

“Bronny,” she starts, but he shakes his head. He squats down and picks up the hand towel, rubbing his head with it and making his hair stand on end like the feathers of a baby duck, and it makes her smile as much as it makes her heart ache, because he’s walking away from her, opening dresser drawers for dry clothes that he drapes over a naked forearm.

“I have to go. Sandor’s waiting for me and the rain’s near gone,” he says, glancing back at her. “Stay as long as you want, get someone to come get you, it doesn’t matter,” he says. “Take the clothes, you can get them back to me some other time.”

“You’re leaving me alone in your bedroom?” she says with an attempt at lightness, with an attempt at a flirty smile, but he groans instead of laughs.

“I have to leave. If I know you’re changing your clothes in here, if _I’m_ here in this house, I can’t trust myself not to do something stupid,” but even when his words are taking him away his body isn’t, and he turns to face her in the doorway. It says more than maybe either of them know, how he’s hovering there between coming and going, the world of yes and the world of no. _Please say yes,_ she thinks.

“But I _want_ you to do something stupid,” she says, walking towards where he stands in the threshold, a lean against the door frame, shoulder to wood. He is wonderful to look at, all tanned skin and young-man-muscle, the faintest scrub of hair on his chest, a light brown fuzz she can recall with the memory of touch.

“That’s exactly why I have to get the hell out of here,” he says with a sad smile. “You’ll be the death of me, kid.”

“I am _not_ a kid,” she says vehemently, voice rising, but he steps forward, a finger aimed at her though it no more touches her than it does scare her. She glowers at him.

“Yes, Margie, you _are_ a fuckin’ kid, by damn near every definition of the word,” he snaps, and he is so far from the Bronn she met and fell for, the laughing, teasing boy dressed up like a man, and it’s not _fair,_ that this is what he is now when they’re together. “Why are you all over the place, huh? I see you every Saturday night but then you’re hanging out on the side of the road, I see you in my- and now you’re in my room, why? Why are you _doing_ this to me?” His voice cracks like ice in hot water on the last word, and she fights back tears.

“Why do you think, you idiot?” and she opens her mouth to just tell him, to tell him she’s got stars in her eyes for him and has since she met him, that she may be a stupid _kid_ but she knows her heart and what lives there now, but he lifts a hand to silence her.

“Don’t you say it, Margie, don’t you _fucking_ dare,” he says, shaking his head as he turns and disappears into the hall. She backs up until she feels his bed against her legs and then sits down, numb to the core, still holding her towel like it’s a cloak around her shoulders. She hears a rustle in the living room and hears him tell the dogs to be good and then there’s the shutting of a door and the slap of a screen, and she bursts into tears.

“Don’t tell me you left the house in that,” Loras says when he picks her up half an hour later, and it was fifteen minutes of crying in a ball on Bronn’s bed wearing his clothes, fifteen minutes of looking around his house after calling Loras, and finally half a minute of scribbling a note of apology and leaving it on his pillow. She left her wet dress on a hanger in his window, floral print to mingle with those of his curtains, the gray post-storm light coming through it and turning it to faded out translucence. She left the towel under it to catch the drips.

More tears.

“Of course I didn’t,” she snaps, curling herself up in his bucket seat before closing the door, immediately taking off her soaked through shoes and tucking her cold feet beneath her. She tells him about the plot and the rainstorm, about how Bronn found her when Renly never drove by, and then Loras grins despite his initial irritation at her meddling.

“Oh, well,” he says, “about Renly,” and she learns that instead of going back to his place Renly went to Highgarden to hang out with Willas, who was out with Mace doing rounds at the far fields. “Instead of leaving he was just sort of hanging out,” her brother says, and she can _feel_ the happiness radiating from him, such a bubbling warm contrast to her damp, teary sorrow, and while part of her feels all the worse for it, the majority of her is buoyed by the brightness of her brother’s grin. “So I asked him if he wanted to play pool, and he said sure.”

They played for two hours, a different pool party from the one Margie had planned, Loras thoroughly trouncing him each time from half a lifetime of practice, and Renly vowed a rematch to retain his pride, but even after the game they lingered over iced tea in the kitchen as they watched the rain. Willas and their father were two wet messes by the time they rolled up the driveway in the golf cart, all sour looks and shivering shoulders as they jogged into the kitchen.

“There was _regret_ there, Margie,” Loras says with triumph. “He didn’t want to stop talking to me when they came in and I swear to God,” he says as he pulls them up the drive, “I swear to God he checked me out before he left. Elevator eyes, the whole bit,” he says, a giddy mess of tousled curls and white teeth flashed in grin after grin.

“So after _all_ my plotting, after _all_ my plans, you did it your damn self,” she says with a laugh. “I guess Bronn was right, in a way,” she says, telling him about their conversation and eventually their argument, and Loras pulls her against his side in a half hug as they walk from the garage to the house.

“We weren’t _quite_ that forward, but I think, you know, there was some honesty in how we talked with each other. There’s this spark, you know? Oh, Margie,” he says when her face falls, because _she_ knows spark, and he ruffles her damp hair, almost curled like his in this humidity. “It’ll be okay. I’ve seen you guys out there with your roses, it’s obvious he likes you.”

“That’s not the issue,” she sniffs. “It’s my dumb age, and I _hate_ it,” she says, and when they see their mother in the kitchen, doing crosswords at the table as usual they skirt around to the backyard, to those roses she helped him plant, and she wanders through the thicket of them, Loras at her side, and she can see with her mind’s eye the way Bronn’s hands pressed into the dirt, looking larger for the suede gloves he wore. She pushes the stem of an orange bloom to the side, letting rain water spill out from the creases and folds of its petals. It looks like it’s crying, and she feels a kinship with it. A lonely girl with a lonely, weeping rose.

“You’ll grow up, Margie. Maybe he’ll wait for you, if you ask him,” and she thinks about how Bronn said men don’t do games, how they do simple questions and answers; she thinks about _Just as friends,_ the way he gripped her towel like a man reaching for a life line, and she sighs.

“Fine, but if I’m going to be so upfront than so are you. Tell him, Lorry. Tell him how you feel and I will too,” and she holds her pinky out over the orange rosebush, and with a roll of the eyes a toss of his head Loras wraps his little finger around hers, and they squeeze their hands together. They are two Tyrells vowing to turn a dying summer of _pining_ into one of _love_ , even if it’s on the back-burner, even if it’s the love of a held breath waiting to be spent in a kiss, and the thought makes her hug herself here in Bronn’s sweatshirt, the only way she can get his arms around her.

_Hey, Bronn, it’s Margie. Um, look, I wanted to say sorry about earlier today, about being so pushy and um, you know. I was wondering if you’d be patient, and if you would um, you know, wait. If you’d be willing to, I mean, until you feel better about everything. It’s not fair for me to be like that when I know how you- well, when I know how it is. So anyways, call me back and let me know when I can get your stuff back to you, my number’s ..._

It is the most awkward message she’s ever left on an answering machine, trying to be vague and yet poignant, to be feeling enough to let him know she’s sincere and be casual enough so Sandor and his dad won’t give him grief for it. She left it yesterday afternoon when she knew they’d all still be out working, not about to try talking with him when he could still be mad, could still have his blood up from their almost-kiss and their definite-fight.

 She even waited until she heard the mowers shut off this morning before getting up. It was miserable, lying in bed, bleary eyed from yesterday’s crying jag and from a rough night’s sleep, because she wanted to run to the window, to see him take his hat off like he’s some lord and she’s some lady, but she is still unsure of where they stand. It would have broken her heart if he ignored her, and so she decided it’s better off not knowing either way than knowing for sure their friendship, their whatever it is, was shut down.

“Your garden is really taking off, honey,” her mother says after she trots downstairs and walks through the kitchen. She’s busy making homemade French bread and the silver and gold of her hair is in an artless bun that somehow looks all the more elegant for it. Alerie has a swipe of flour on her chin, and with a smile Margie wipes it clean. “That landscaper really taught you a thing or two, didn’t he,” she says, and the double meaning is so heavy she wonders if her mother can read minds, thoughts, hearts.

“His name is Bronn,” she says, and her mother says _Ah, mmhmm,_ as she kneads her dough. Margie gets herself a glass of iced tea before heading out to the midmorning glow, clouds fluffy and white but already building on the horizon. _A big build up for nothing,_ she thinks with a sigh, taking a long drink of tea before setting the glass on a white wrought iron table by the pool chairs and crossing the flagstone towards her roses, the wet grass an uneven mix of warm and cool, earth spongy beneath her bare feet. They _are_ taking off, all these roses, and she thinks about her mother making bread and how she says she makes it with love, and she wonders if these flowers were planted with it, however new and undefined it was then back in May. Her mind is a swarm of him, like bees in a hive when a sudden soft touch on her bare shoulder makes her jump.

She half turns towards the touch, sees it is an unopened rosebud, so vividly orange it makes her think of tropical islands she’s never been to, and it leaves a dew-cool trail of shiver in its wake, goosebumps rising to the call just as her gaze lifts from the flower to Bronn’s face. He’s standing behind her and to the side, eyes cast down to the rose that slides like a tear down her arm where it comes to rest on the hypersensitive skin of her inner elbow. If she bends her arm she could capture it, but she does not move, save to turn towards him fully.

“Of course I’ll wait,” he murmurs to the flower before flicking his gaze up to her. “What do you think I’ve been doing all summer?”

“I’m sorry,” she breathes, watching as he lifts the rose to smell it, and she knows what he means now as he gazes at her, brown eyes hot, that he wants not the scent of the flower but to catch the scent of her skin, and in her youth it’s the single most erotic thing she’s ever experienced, even watched in the movies. He kisses the flower before extending it to her, and she sighs as she wraps her fingers around the stem, and she understands him now to know not to brush her fingers against his, that if it’s waiting they’re to do then they’ll do it properly.

“I’m sorry too, honey,” he says, and she feels a throb in the sweet, dark center of her she has rarely explored to hear him call her a pet name, to hear something so tender out of his mouth. No more pipsqueak or small fry, she is _honey_ to him now. It makes her lick her lips.

“It’s a good thing you can’t kiss me I guess, considering my mom’s behind us in the kitchen,” she says, and it makes him grin, a sweet slow slide that is far more intense than the boyish ones that are always so quick to spring upon him.

“Oh yeah? You not tell her about me or something?” She grins back at him, because he is going to _wait_ for her, because she is something special enough to him, something that is worth the delay of gratification, and the panting heavy urgency with Ned at the bonfire party is _nothing_ to this. This right here is incomparable to anything.

“I told her your name is Bronn. That’s all she knows, for now,” Margie smiles, looking down at the perfect orange rosebud in her grasp. It’s full of sunlight, a dazzle even though it has yet to open.

“What about you, hmm? What do you know about me?” He sticks his hands in his pockets, shoulders up as he gazes at her. She can feel it, his look, knows the weight of it now, precious as stars or snow falling on her. Margie turns the rose in her fingers until the side he kissed faces her, and she smiles, lifting it to her mouth to press a kiss on top of his, and she can hear his sharp inhale. Margie beams up at him, making him smile right back.

“Enough to be sure.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/107224858773/one-fine-summer-chapter-5-feels)

“Afternoon, Mr. Tyrell, Mrs. Tyrell,” Bronn says as he stands here on their front porch, resisting the urge to nervously jingle the car keys in his hand. Inexplicably, miraculously, Margie has worked her persuasive magic on her parents and they have agreed to let him teach her how to drive stick so she can drive a standard Jeep. Loras has his hand in it too, refusing to let his sister ruin his precious Mustang though he could care less.

“Come on in, Bronn, Margaer- I mean, Margie’s just now getting ready,” Alerie Tyrell says, standing aside to let him in, and for the first time in his life he steps inside the mansion of Highgarden, the floor beneath his feet a high polished marble, completely different to the grass he’s been laying in each Saturday night for the past eight months, save for the past several weeks. It is January now and storm after winter storm have left snow on the ground, have rendered late night rendezvous impossible, and so he has the pleasure of hearing her voice, hushed and sleepy as they talk on the phone from the comfort of their own beds. He realizes he is daydreaming, realizes that Mace and Alerie are looking at him, and he clears his throat, his baseball hat a wad of faded fabric in his hands.

 “How’re the uh, the crops doing this winter?” He and his old man have chickens and dogs and a couple of horses but farming is not something either man is into, and so he fastens on a look of polite interest. Mace chuckles.

“Most of the fields have been planted with winter cover, but we’ve got a few on the south end of the farm with cabbages,” he says, and Bronn nods as if he understands any of what he just said.

“Cabbages and kings,” Margie says from the stairway, the thick carpeting silencing her approach, and he grins before he can help himself. She’s in a knit cap and scarf, a black pea coat and a pair of jeans, and she looks like she just stepped out of a magazine.  “Hey, Bronn,” she says with a smile, a glitter of mischief in her eyes that seems to be reserved only for him these days, a glitter he conjures up with his mind’s eye late at night when the thought of her becomes unbearable, when he cannot sleep for the wanting of her.

“Hey, Margie,” he says, and they’re both a couple of foolish grins when she leaves the last step; she’s grown taller, slowly but surely, and is far closer to his height now, is the pour of lemon scented water into a vessel shaped more like a woman than a girl these days.

Mace clears his throat and they both snap out of each other, and her father is a frown waiting for him when Bronn finally looks up at him. There is also curiosity there, a sneaking suspicion perhaps, but it clears quickly enough, as if he knows his daughter is pretty enough to turn any man’s head, though Bronn has a fleeting concern that Mace simply thinks it impossible because what man would look at a teenager that way?

“Come on, Bronn, I’ve got less than five months to master this, and I full plan on acing that driving test,” Margie says, all straight spine and thrown back shoulders after she kisses her mother’s cheek, after he shakes her father’s hand and they head out into the crisp afternoon. The sky is a cornflower blue above them, the sun a merry shine without a single cloud up there to blot it out, but the ever present wind bites, and Margie _Brrrs_ as she hugs herself. His arm is halfway in a lift to drape over her shoulders and pull her in to him, but he’s sure her parents are watching as they get into his truck, and he’s too scared to look to make sure.

He has been true to his own terms in the near year he’s known her, hasn’t so much as laid a finger on her, but his resolve is weakening, chipped away like flecks of porcelain that he seems to shed wherever he goes. Sometimes he swears he can hear it crunching underfoot.

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” she says, hands on her hips as she stops behind his truck, and he laughs when she huffs at him. “Seriously, Bronn?”

“What, and set you loose on Sonoita without giving anyone fair warning?” he grins, looking at his dad’s closed tailgate where he’s written with window paint _Learning stick shift, keep your distance, still scary._ “Come on, let’s get into town and then we’ll put you behind the wheel,” and they part ways to get in the truck, and she pops a cassette of Shania Twain in the stereo before he’s even got the damned key in the ignition. He’s about to bitch about this girly music but then she’s turning towards him with a big bright smile, warm as a field full of daisies, and he finds he can’t remember what he was going to say.

“I developed those photographs I took at your house,” she says, pulling a small manila envelope out of her purse, and he’s grinning down at a photograph of his dad on Penny, working a little life into her. Her mane is a whip in the air and there is the ever present cigarette hanging out of his father’s mouth.

“It’s a good shot,” he says, and he grins when she tells him it’s for him. He feels like magpie with the little gifts she gives him, the friendship bracelet he’s been wearing on his right wrist for the past three months, a beat up old Brooks & Dunn baseball hat she found while shopping up in Tucson, that apology note she left on his pillow. That dress of hers that he’s still got hanging in his window, though Sandor gave him a ration of shit for it, but he’s grown used to the way the sunlight streams in through the flowers of it, doesn’t know what he’d do without a night full of dreams that are inspired on account of it.

There are pictures of Nugget, pictures of himself doing the mundane, walking across the driveway with a scuttle of chickens behind him or squinting in the sun, and he has to hand it to her because he absolutely cannot remember her ever taking these. Margie lifts her hand and plucks from the photos in his grasp one towards the back.

“This one’s my favorite,” and he’s surprised that it’s a photo of Sandor, but once he studies it a moment he understands why she likes it. It’s a silhouette of him walking the length of the shotgun hallway of the barn with a lead rope hanging in his hand, and he is framed in the backlight of a fall afternoon, is a looming hulk of shadow. It speaks of loneliness and solitude, and for a moment Bronn loses himself in it, in how it’s a man holding a rope connected to nothing, a man alone. It is _sad_ , profoundly so, and when he glances to Margie she’s nodding.

“I feel like I cracked open his heart and rifled around through it when I got it developed,” she says, and he thinks that’s about the best way to sum it up. “Don’t tell him I took it, though, I don’t think he’d be very happy.”

“Secret’s safe with me, honey,” he says, giving the stick shift a wiggle before pushing it to the side and up into first, and the look she gives him to be called that particular term of endearment is so sweet he almost forgets to tell her to pay attention to what he’s doing.

The ten mile drive goes quick and before he knows it they’re in town, parked in the huge rodeo racetrack parking lot. They’ve switched places and Margie’s hot pink fingernail is a tap against the stick shift, so over-worn from nearly a decade of constant use that the numbers have faded. Bronn and his dad drive from memory now, the rusty red truck as familiar as an old friend.

“First, second, third,” she says, but he shakes his head, hand a hover over hers that he drops to the bench seat between their thighs.

“Third is up. It goes up down, up down, not left to right. It’s a stick shift, not a book,” he says, grinning when she rolls her eyes.  She starts the car and wiggles the stick like he does and he hides a smile to see it, to know she pays such close attention to him, and then they’re both staring down at her feet.

“Okay, so I press the clutch all the way down,” she says, more to herself then to him though he nods anyways, “and then I push on the gas,” and she promptly stalls out.

“Don’t get frustrated, it’s the first time you’ve tried it,” he says encouragingly, but ten minutes later and they’re still in the same goddamn parking spot. “I swear to God, honey, if they knew how bad you are at this, they’d never have given you a permit,” he says, and the only thing keeping him from losing his temper is how frustrated _she_ looks. Her cheeks are pink as if they are outside in the cold and not inside a warmed up cab, and she slaps the steering wheel with an open hand.

“Stupid truck,” she snaps, and he chuckles, rubbing his temples with his index and middle fingers. It’s not the way he wants to spend an afternoon in a truck with a pretty girl, but here he is, feeling bad for his dad’s truck, watching Margie get madder than a wet cat, and the expletives that fly out of her mouth with each stall out get more and more colorful. It would amuse him if he wasn’t so annoyed.

“Don’t blame the truck now, Margie, it’s all your own damn fault. You’re not giving it enough gas,” he says as she glares at him before she turns the engine over again, and he is so frustrated with her that when she depresses the gas pedal he finally reaches over, her kneecap a snug fit in the palm of his hand when he presses down on her leg with all his strength. “Let go of the clutch now.”

“Bronn!” she gasps, her hands gripping the steering wheel so tight her knuckles are white.

“Do as I say, goddammit,” he growls, and _finally_ the truck jumps to life, making Margie squeal as the extra push of gas sends the Chevy leaping forward in an outburst like an unbroken horse. He tells her to shift down to second once she’s got the hang of it, and then they’re doing long, loopy donuts in the parking lot, both of them laughing with relief to be rid of the irritated tension that was filling the cab of the truck.

He directs her onto the road so they can get the truck into third gear and he is able to relax, relatively speaking, though every time she has to downshift he watches her footwork with an anxious eye. He has her pull off on the side of the road so he can drive them back to her house, and he jogs around the front of the truck, blowing warm breath into his cupped hands, and now they’re sitting in the truck, Bronn behind the wheel and Margie with her back pressed against the passenger door, grinning at each other.

“I did it,” she says with a happy sigh. “I didn’t think I was going to, but I finally did it.” 

“You sure did,” he grins, turning the key in the ignition, forearm draped over the steering wheel as he wiggles the stick, but her next statement makes him freeze a moment before turning to her.

“You grabbed my leg,” she says lightly, and he lets her words float down on him like a snapped open bed sheet drifting down to the mattress. He huffs.

“I did,” he says with a clearing of his throat, turning back to look at the steering wheel as he puts the truck in gear and eases it back on the road. They are quiet for several minutes as they drive back to Highgarden, his thoughts a hum, because he _did_ touch her leg, and while it was down in a moment of absolute frustration and not the sexual kind, he can still feel her on his hand, the curve of her knee, the softness of flesh around it and beneath the dig of his fingertips. Bronn opens his mouth to say something, to apologize or swear it won’t happen again, but when he drops his hand to the seat between them she rests her hand on top of his, and he jumps, the touch is such a startle to him.

“It’s not that bad, is it? I mean, after all this time, can’t I just hold your hand, Bronny?” He glances to her, eyes wide and expression devoid of mischief. It’s a question, soft like old flannel, and despite the way he feels about her, the way she looked at him all those months ago while standing dripping wet in his room, there’s sweetness to it, an innocence that makes him think of puppies, hot chocolate with marshmallows in it. She’s turning him into an idiot, but it’s a question that asks for affection, and there is no way he can walk away from it, anymore. He turns his hand beneath hers and in happy reply she laces her fingers with his, palm a warm little press to his, her skin like silk between his fingers.

“Yeah, honey, you can hold my hand,” he says, and they do, all the rest of the way to her house, his thumb a nonstop drift along the long knuckle of hers. He looks out at the road while Margie gazes out the window, and it’s a silent ride filled with the warm light of a setting sun, filled with interlaced fingers and the peace he finds there; contentment, for the time being, just to hold this girl-woman’s hand.

 

Sandor wonders what he was thinking when he decided to drive into Tucson to drink at some bar, though a part of him is pretty sure it has to do with Margie Tyrell sitting around on _his_ sofa, Bronn’s arm around her, her legs crossed at the ankle as she rests her stocking feet on the coffee table like she owns it. It is females in his house and a reminder that it will never be _him_ watching shitty movies on a Saturday night with a girl under his arm. It is losing the roommate he’s come to think of as his friend, because all Bronn can do these days is wander like a lost dog after Margie, and if she’s not around then the starry eyed idiot is talking about her.

So he has fled the sudden onslaught of love and laughter and romance that has filled his small world, a bota bag fit to burst from the overflow of loaded looks and smoldering smiles, of teenaged Tyrells pulling in admiration from the older men of Sonoita who seem to get snared so easily. He’s sitting next to one of them now as they both swig from their cocktails at the bar, Renly a gin and tonic and Sandor a bourbon and coke. It’s sweet, this drink, makes him think of a faded out and tired old memory of a chess pie his mother used to make, a dessert he hasn’t tasted in 15 years. As delicious as the drink is, it’s not enough to shove out the doubt, and he sighs with a rattle of his ice.

“I don’t think this was such a great idea,” he says, referring to running into Renly Baratheon at the only liquor store in Sonoita, a small adobe building on the southwest corner of the 82 and 83, full of overpriced booze and shitty homemade sandwiches. Renly saw him staring balefully at the bottles of whiskey, arms crossed over his chest, and said _You look like you need a night out,_ and because Sandor has been 21 for months without ever once stepping foot in a bar he said _Fuck it._ Here they are, a caravan of two that’s driven 45 minutes to sit at some bar called The Shelter, so extravagantly decorated he wondered if it was a gay bar, but then Renly assured him that if anyone needed to get laid tonight it’s Sandor, that it’s just a kitschy 60s theme, and since he’s never had sex in his life he begrudgingly thinks it’s true.

“Of course it’s a great idea,” Renly says, “my boyfriend and your best friend can’t go to bars yet, and so far you’ve struck out in Sonoita, so why not broaden the playing field? Plus it’s so fun, watching my friends flirt,” and Sandor wonders when the hell he and Renly Baratheon became friends. They were in high school together but Renly was always surrounded by chicks, always handsomely sloppy with his roguish grins and rakish glances to the girls on his left, the girls on his right, that one substitute teacher who nearly tripped over her own feet when he waltzed late into geometry class. As if on cue a girl walks by, giving Renly the rubbernecked one-two, her eyes a drop from his face to his chest and back before disappearing into the women’s restroom.

“Looks like you’re going to have better luck than I will. You could probably follow her in there and fuck her brains out. She’d buy you a drink afterwards, I wager,” he says, and it’s too hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice so he doesn’t even bother. Sandor shifts on the barstool and sighs, glances with distaste as Renly lights a cigarette, and he is reminded of Jonn’s cough-and-hack, the grey tint his skin has taken on lately, in perfect mimicry of the ashes lying around in all those clay ashtrays Bronn made for his dad in elementary school.

“I played straight long enough, thank you,” Renly says coolly, shaking the ice in his glass before knocking back the rest of the cocktail, and the sound of it stokes Sandor’s thirst, and he follows suit, draining his whiskey and coke before pushing the empty glass towards the bartender. She eyes him, half wary, half curious, 100% annoying, but she refills his drink without question. It’s one of the better exchanges he has had with women.

“At least you got to play at it,” Sandor snorts, “I’ve barely been able to be a spectator, let alone a player,” but then Renly raises his eyebrows and swivels towards him on his stool, flicking his ash into the cut glass ashtray beside his drink.

“You think it’s fun, being in the closet, hiding who you are? You think fucking women you don’t want just so you can save face is fun? It’s a fuckin’ nightmare, Clegane. It sucks and it’s a lie. I’m finally happy because I’m finally myself. Loras holds my hand. Loras tells me he loves me, and it’s like for the first time I’m breathing actual air. So go get laid tonight, go fuck some chick’s brains out, but leave me out of it, man. I’m not the reason you’re alone, okay?”

It’s ill-concealed anger and it’s hurt, it’s sorrow, and for the first time Sandor looks at Renly with some clarity. He wonders if there’s a closet he’s stuck in, but then he snorts a laugh into his refreshed drink because of course there is. It’s the closet and the trap and the prison of his scars, and he will always live a shit life, a life of lies because of it, a life where he is walking and talking, breathing and moving but not really living. He bows his head and lets the hair fall in his face, and it nearly does the trick, close as it falls to his shoulder, but then there is a bony tap on his shoulder, and he lifts his head and turns to his left where a cute blonde stands with too much makeup on her face and too much booze in her belly. She is glassy eyed, a swaying wisp of determination, and while she does look at the scars she also lift her eyes to his. He has to give her credit for it.

“Hey,” she breathes, and he can smell the bar’s signature watermelon margarita on her word.

“Hey,” he says, gruff and suspicious, waiting for _Ohmigod what happened to your face_ or _Ohmigod that looks horrible_ or _Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod._ She takes his glass from the bar and drinks from it, bold as you please, and he doesn’t even need to glance back at Renly to feel that fucker’s grin, or to even ask if this is flirtation, because even _Sandor_ knows.

“So,” she sighs, setting his drink down and nearly spilling it, and she is fake streaks of dye in her hair, white on blonde, she is caked on eye shadow and a jaunty lean against the bar. “I totally told my friends I’d bang you, and if you come home with me I’ll win fifty bucks,” she says triumphantly. Sandor narrows his eyes, drinks his drink, pulling the glass away from the loose grip she still has on it.

“Why fifty bucks?” he says, and now he does glance back at Renly, wondering if this is a thing that women do, but Renly simply shrugs before stubbing out his cigarette.

“They didn’t think I’ve got the nerve to ask you, on account of, you know,” she says, and it’s a flippant gesture, made casual from booze, as she aims her finger towards the left side of his face.

“You got the nerve to follow through?” he asks, because it’s not ideal but it’s still a woman asking for him, it’s still a woman looking him in the face and saying _I’ll take it,_ and it’s more than he’s ever been offered in all his life.

“Hey man, wait a second,” Renly murmurs, and Sandor swivels a bit in his chair to look at his unlikely companion. “You don’t have to do this, dude, there’s- there’s other ways. I’m sure there’s a woman out there for you,” and here Sandor laughs.

“There’s no one out there for this face,” he says, draining his second drink of the night before turning back to Nameless. “I’ll help you make fifty bucks, blondie.”

He drives her home in his truck when Renly assures him Loras will come to get him after a ten minute conversation between the two lovebirds on the payphone outside, and she’s a stagger and a slur when they finally get into her bedroom. He feels almost obligated to get as drunk as she is and so he’s swigging shitty wine as she takes her clothes off, giggling to him about how she never does this, how he’s so scary looking, how she’s such a badass for winning the bet. It’s a swim and a blur when it happens, when she rides him so erratically he wonders if this is _really_ what sex is and not some comical joke, but then he comes, the condom a slick mess, and suddenly he is no longer a virgin.

It’s a cold, awkward morning of dropped glances and shrugging shoulders, of _I don’t have any coffee but Circle K sells a good cup just down the street,_ of _I’m not a one night stand kind of girl_ and his reply of _You sure tell a different story in the daylight._ He’s never asked a woman for her number and he’s not about to start now, and so it’s a hasty retreat he beats to his truck, a long drive home that is full of self-loathing and disgust, and he wishes he could forget the taste of her tongue on his. He remembers Renly telling him there’s a girl out there for him, and the sting of so cruel a lie cuts him the entire drive home.

Bronn’s up by the time he comes home, midmorning on a Sunday, and his dad’s a cloud of smoke out by the barn when Sandor steps out of his truck, slams the door and crunches across the driveway to the house. His roommate, his friend, his coworker has the easy grin of a man in love slathered all over his face, and Sandor wants to punch him for it, but then Bronn’s face falls when they lock eyes.

“You look like you could use a drink,” he says, blocking Sandor’s entry into the house. Sandor scowls.

“I had drinks last night. Enough of them to get a girl to fuck me, though she couldn’t even look me in the eyes this morning.” It’s a sour truth to spit out, reminds him of the one time he tried his brother’s chewing tobacco and threw up all afternoon.

“Yeah, well, I think you need another one, brother,” Bronn says, and it’s a twist in Sandor’s heart, that kindness, and he’s worried they’re going to hug or something, but then Bronn grins. “Plus I never shy away from a breakfast beer,” and he claps Sandor on the shoulder before turning back to swipe a few of his dad’s Miller Lites, and they spend the rest of the morning out back, chickens pecking at the dirt beneath their feet as Sandor tells him how he lost his virginity, how he never thought it would leave with a piece of his self-respect.

 

“I still don’t know what I’m doing here,” Bronn whispers to Renly after the latter man rings the doorbell at Highgarden. He’s been holding Margie’s hand for two weeks now, their driving lessons a dreamy thing of snow on the grass and wind buffeting the truck as they fly down the 83, fingers laced together, smiles and laughter but mostly just silence, just happiness to finally touch. It’s almost too much for him to bear, but he has his winter nights alone in bed, using feverish time wisely, and so he’s as serene as he can be while teaching her the downshift and the more subtle arts of driving stick. He’s as serene as he can be now, but then they’ve been cruising around town for weeks hand in hand. What if someone saw? _What if Mace kills me?_

“You’re here because your girlfriend is clever, and told your parents you are good friends with Willas. Just like I supposedly am, and I don’t even want to think of how many bottles of wine I’m going to have to give the guy for covering our asses,” Renly grins, glancing to Bronn at his right. “Don’t underestimate Tyrell smarts,” he says just before the door opens, and while Bronn’s not into dudes in the slightest, there is something sweet about the way Loras barrels out the front door, kissing Renly full on the mouth before kissing the scruff of his cheek. He’s not into dudes, but there _is_ a Tyrell he wishes _he_ could kiss right now, but Loras is the one who has just recently turned 18, and his Margie is still three months shy of turning 16. _Time is supposed to fly when you’re having fun,_ he thinks, but then there is fun they’ve not yet had, and he’s watching her like a pot of water waiting for it to boil, so he has to content himself with held hands and the one time she kissed him on the cheek. He nearly came in his pants when she did, it’s been that long for him.

“Come on in, you guys,” Loras says with a grin, and Bronn steps into the Tyrell manse for the second time in his life, hands in his pockets and eyes up at the chandelier in the hall, eyes to the carpeted stair off to the side, to the oil paintings that hang here and there as if he is in a museum and not a farmhouse. _A fuckin’ farmhouse,_ he thinks with a shake of his head, his mind’s eye full of the rickety barn in his backyard and the tumble of uncultivated land Jonn is so prideful over, the cracks in the kitchen linoleum.

“Hey, Bronny,” Margie whispers as she drifts across the hall from the living room, a glance and a grin cast over her shoulder like fishing nets into water, and he is dutifully snared, following her as she heads into the dining room with a _Hey_ gusting out of his mouth. It’s a richly set table where Mace is already seated at the head of the table, and it’s a hectic bustle of Tyrells as Margie and Loras help their mother bring dishes to the table, as Willas comes in from the backyard with a slam of French doors, color in his cheeks from the chill. Bronn and Renly exchange handshakes with the eldest Tyrell sibling, knowing grins cast to both of them from Willas, and Renly is an amused roll of his eyes when Willas pointedly has him sit next to Loras.

They lay into homemade fried chicken and mashed potatoes, fresh bread and cole slaw, made from Highgarden cabbages, and Margie grins at him when he nearly chokes on a bite after Mace proudly announces that fact. It’s a clatter of silverware and a chinkling of ice in glasses, and he learns that Mace is grooming Willas to take over in a few years, that Loras has about as much interest in farm life as his sister, and they laugh together when Alerie tells them they could be a little more supportive.

“And how about you, Bronn? Is landscaping it for you or do you have other plans?” Alerie says, and he clears his throat and puts down his fork, wondering how to dress up the lack of desire to do anything else. He thinks of Sandor, cradling the saplings to his chest in the rain, a not-so-gentle giant who loves the land.

“Well,” he says after chasing his mouthful of food with a sip of water. “I love it here and have no plans to leave, and Sandor and I are thinking of making it a legitimate business. We uh, well, Sandor mostly has a green thumb, and we’re looking into maybe starting up a nursery,” and he lets loose a silent exhale of relief when Alerie nods approvingly.

“Sandor’s the one I was telling you about,” Margie says, and it’s not jealousy, necessarily, that Bronn feels, but he still frowns in confusion when he looks across the table at her, but she’s looking at her father and not him, and Mace hums as he tries to jog his own memory, looking up at the ceiling.

“Oh, that’s right, the one who wants Barristan’s acreage,” Mace says, and Bronn’s eyebrows shoot up on his forehead. “I don’t know, Margie, it’s not really my place,” Mace begins, but either he underestimates his daughter or forgets who he’s talking to.

“You and Barristan go way back, daddy, of course it’s your place. You and he own the largest spreads of Sonoita land, now that Doran’s put up Sunspear on the market,” and Bronn catches Renly’s start of surprise sitting there next to him, the way thoughtfulness settles in his features; Doran is his biggest competition, and this news must be of great interest to him. “Anyways,” Margie continues, pushing her potatoes around her plate with the perfect expression of nonchalance. “I think old Barry would appreciate some input, and Sandor, as Bronn just said, is interested in staying put and working the land. Someone like Mr. Selmy would appreciate that, and if he put money down on half and then worked off the rest of it, that would ensure he’d stick around and take care of the property,” Margie says, and Bronn’s jaw literally drops when he sees Mace consider it.

“I can always call him on Monday morning, after Willas and I do our rounds,” Mace says with a shrug, and he looks to Bronn. “A nursery, huh. You know, Mr. Payne down by the racetrack has an old warehouse down by the 83, I bet he’d be willing to part with it, seeing as he’s retiring,” and it’s with wide eyes that Bronn looks at Margie, and she’s an infinitesimal shrug of victory, sly enough that her parents don’t see it.

“I just want him to be happy,” she murmurs later as he’s hugging her goodbye on the front porch, and her words are a muffle on his denim jacket. “If he can’t find love than maybe he can find peace with a little slice of something that’s all his,” and he closes his eyes when she kisses his cheek because she’s about the sweetest thing he’s ever met, though she’s powerful enough to be wary of, and he wonders how many times she’s worked things over where he’s concerned. _But then, really,_ Bronn thinks as he jogs through the cold to the truck, glancing and waving over his shoulder where he knows she watches him through her window. _do I even care_?

He doesn’t.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/107347727903/one-fine-summer-chapter-6)

The breezy summer air is full of squeals as Margie swings her Jeep off the road and into the unfenced field that Sandor signed off on only a month ago, headlights a glow against the grasses that are blonder than Nugget’s mane. Alysanne, Ellie and Meredyth are white knuckled grips to the roll bar above them but Margie is all confidence, a wild grin in the evening as she hunches over the steering wheel, shifting down to second as they take the tumble and swell of the land in stride, another bump of soil and grass eliciting a backseat shriek from Elinor.

It is June, and Bronn has convinced Sandor to throw a bonfire party with him on his newly acquired patch of land, a sliver of Sonoita she all but handed to him tied up with ribbon though he’ll never know it, not after the pinky swear pact she made with Bronn. The fat happy moon is rivaled by the roaring blaze at the bottom of a long, scrubby slope, white grass glowing orange on the other side of the fire ring of stones, and behind it is the beginnings of the greenhouse Sandor will use to grow the plants he and Bronn intend to sell. It’s put together with mismatched wood he’s gathered up from other people’s scrap piles around town, though according to Bronn he’s saving up to buy the glass in Tucson, and these days more often than not Sandor sleeps inside the half built structure, the earth beneath his head and the stars above him. Margie smiles as she kills the engine, hopping out after she unclicks her seatbelt, and after the jostle and thrill of the drive here the ground feels unsure, tricky beneath her feet, and it only serves to add to her giddiness, tonight.

“That ride better not have messed up my hair,” Meredyth says, patting the crown of her head as she looks in the sun visor mirror, the little lights on either side of it illuminating her face a moment before she slaps it shut, and hers is an expression of lovesick excitement, wide eyes and parted mouth. “I know Jaime’s going to be here.”

“I think he’s a liiittle out of your league,” Elinor says with a laugh as she jumps out of the backseat with a grunt.  “Old Green Eyes could get any chick he wants, plus he just _graduated_ ,” she says. Margie rolls her eyes.

“What’s age got to do with anything? Go put your moves on him, Meredyth, screw it,” she says with a flip of her hair over her shoulder, and then Loras whoops to her, excited high school graduate, jogging over with a Bud Light and a grin, his arm a warm sling over her shoulder as he pulls her into him.

“Nice night for a party, huh,” he says as she takes his beer from him, swigging it back before he reclaims it. Her friends scatter through the crowd, and _everyone_ is here tonight; Sandor might not be a social butterfly, but there is nothing about a party this town doesn’t like, and she sees kids from all four grades at Buena, sees folks Bronn’s age and older. Someone’s blaring George Strait from a car stereo and she’s humming along as Renly materializes out of nowhere, tossing her a can of beer that she catches, cold and slippery and fresh from the cooler. It is _free_ tonight, the music floating up to the night sky, the flames in hot pursuit as they arc and dance in the wind, whip skyward in a swirl like mermaid hair. Laughter and occasional shrieks ring out above the decibel of conversation and chatter, faces illuminated by the fire here and there, Renly a bob of lit cigarette that Loras finally plucks and stamps out in the dirt beneath their feet.

“Seriously, it’s disgusting, Ren, you should quit,” Loras says, though he doesn’t seem to mind it when Renly kisses him full on the mouth, and she can’t help but smile and watch as they sink into each other, brazen as they please out here where moonlight means flame, in the warm space of firelight flickers and the snap-crack of burning wood, in the country music croon. She barely manages to refrain from flinging her arms around the two of them in a bear hug.

“Don’t try to change me, baby,” Renly says when he finally pulls away, and Margie laughs between sips of her beer. She scans the crowd for Bronn, for a baseball hat and a face split into laughter, but while she can see Sandor leaning against the corner frame of his greenhouse, beer in hand, Bronn is nowhere to be seen. “Great party, huh,” Renly says. “Everybody and their mother is out here tonight.”

“Let’s hope not _our_ mother,” Loras says to Margie, and she huffs in agreement; her parents thinks she’s sleeping over at Elinor’s tonight, not drinking beer with a bunch of guys on a 21 year old man’s property.     

“Hey, stranger,” a voice says behind her, and it’s Quentyn drifting up to her left, and she finds herself in an awkward side hug with a boy she used to think about all the time, a boy she realizes she hasn’t thought of in over a year. She feels bad but it’s the honest truth, and she smiles with a sort of wince when he draws back to beam at her. “How’ve you been?”

They chat aimlessly for a few minutes, and he tells her some folks are sleeping out here when she notices the handful of tents on top of the hill, that a bunch of the older partiers are, including his sisters, that there’s room in their tents if she wants to crash here. Margie narrows her eyes in a sly grin at him, knowing full well what he’s hinting at, and she’s about to give him a smart slap of a piece of her mind when she sees Willas making out with someone.

“Holy shit, that can _not_ be my brother,” she says with a laugh, because Mr. Straight As and Football Scholarship is never one to just get drunk and start Frenching people.

“It’s your brother and my sister,” Quentyn laughs. “Martells and Tyrells gravitate to each other I guess,” and when she squints she can see it’s Arianne, the older girl she saw at her school, and she wonders fleetingly if she drove her Jaguar over here through the fields. Her skin glows like caramel in the dusky firelight, her hair a glossy sheen lit up orange and yellow, shining like lacquer, and Margie shrugs and nods, because hey, she gets it.

“You go on and get it, Willas,” she murmurs, watching as her brother stands there with a grin on his face after Arianne pulls away, presumably to get another beer, and she uses that selfsame excuse to part ways with Quentyn. The coolers are all lined up against the skeletal structure of the greenhouse, red and white Igloos and Colemans and she sees Sandor talking with Brienne Tarth in his typical clips and phrases, grunts and frowns. It sparks a curious interest in Margie, seeing how similar they are, tall and broad, serious and taciturn, and she wonders maybe if there’s a love match here for old Sandor. Brienne’s a bit on the plain side but her eyes are remarkable, so much so even Loras has commented on it, and she’s got her wheels turning, images  rising like bonfire smoke of somehow getting them to bump into each other, but then Jaime Lannister walks by and Brienne’s gaze follows him. Margie sighs. All the girls in an uproar over stupid Jaime, she just doesn’t get it.

“Hey guys,” she says to the pair of them as she bends down to grab another beer, and she hides a grin, stifles a laugh at Sandor’s customary snort of a greeting, and it’s with amusement that she turns and cracks open her beer and swigs from it, surveying the crowd from this slightly higher vantage point, and that’s when she sees Bronn. He’s sitting on his open tailgate, truck parked closest to the fire on account of likely being here since the afternoon, and there’s a woman standing between his cocked out knees, her hands on his thighs, and she can tell it’s foxy, lovely-to-look-at Arianne Martell, and Margie thinks she’s going to throw up.

 

“Come on, what’s wrong? You used to _love_ touching me in high school,” Arianne says, her voice a tilt and lilt from the two hits of ecstasy she’s just told him she’s taken. Her eyes are wide pools of spilled ink, her hair an unbound tumble of shine, she’s a walk down a beach in Mexico but it’s nothing anymore, nothing save an uncomfortable intrusion on an otherwise laid back night.

“First off, we’re not in high school anymore, sweetheart, and secondly I’m spoken for, and _thirdly,_ I just saw you making out with Willas, for chrissakes,” and the jokester in him wants to tell her he’s not that kind of man, but she’s making him uncomfortable. He’s been sitting here a good ten minutes, trying to find Margie, and he’s more than a little nervous she’s going to walk up to him when he’s got a crotch full of a grinding Arianne Martell.

“It’s a free country,” she says nonsensically, laughing with her head thrown back, “Oh my God, everything feels so good right now. I feel like I could take a bite out of the air,” and he’s half worried she’s going to try and take a bite out of _him,_ the way she’s running her hands up and down his thighs, and he’s already angling away from her when he sees a blur of blue jeans and boots, hair like melted honey and he knows it’s her.

“Goddammit, Arianne, go fuck with someone else,” he spits, pushing her away from him, not caring that she stumbles because he’s sure someone else will take care of that mess, and he sprints after Margie, tripping and stumbling over a rock in his haste. “Margie!”

“Get away from me,” she seethes, turning around to shove him square in his chest, and it’s a cruel mockery of when they first met, because this time there are tears in her eyes, tears he’s helped to put there, and Bronn is beside himself. “Is she your little piece on the side or something, huh _Bronny_?” she says, and it’s a bitter, angry emphasis on her pet name for him, dripping with disdain and sarcasm. It stings him.

“What the hell are you talking about? She just came up to me, Margie, I swear to God. She’s all jacked up on drugs, okay, she probably doesn’t know what she’s doing,” he says, lowering his voice to a hiss when Gregor’s old friends Meryn and Boros walk by, sniggering at their argument, and there a whisper in the back of his head that trouble’s in store, but then Margie folds her arms across her chest, actually stamps the ground with her boot, and he can do nothing but stare at her.

“Are you _defending_ her now? Are you guys like, what, are you _fucking_ her so you can get your rocks off while you sit around holding my hand like a, like a monk or something?” He sucks in a sharp inhale and huffs it out because the suggestion is so far out of line, is such a dig when he’s been gritting his teeth and just barely holding himself back for over a year, when he has suffered sleepless nights and agonizing days for the want of her, and now his loyalty is being tested.

“I’m not _fucking_ anyone, Margie, believe me,” he snaps. “That’s the first time Arianne has laid a hand on me since she dumped me junior year of high school, okay? I’ve been waiting around for you this _entire time_ because I’m in _love_ with you. Yeah, that’s right,” he adds gruffly when her jaw drops, when her arms uncross and fall to hang by her sides. “Idiot,” he says, and when she comes in to shove him again he’s ready for her, and he grabs her by the wrists and drags her in to his chest, bending her arms behind him where they immediately lace around his back.

“You’re the idiot,” she says when he cups her face in his hands, once elfish and all girl, now more a woman than ever before, here where she stands so close, where she is pressed flush to him, where the blaze of bonfire lights her up like a Christmas tree, turning her blue eyes amber and her hair to gold.

“Tell me about it,” he says, lowering his head to kiss her, her mouth a hot capture of strawberry lip gloss against his, and before they close his eyes roll back in his head to finally taste her. Time stops. It curls up and burns in the fire behind him when her lips part against his and he has the slide of her tongue in his mouth and against his. He moves one hand from the plane of her cheekbone into her hair, burying his fingers to the third knuckle in it, the other dropping to smooth down her back to hold her against him. _She’s mine all mine,_ he thinks to himself in a wild, giddy way, the pound of his pulse and the sounds of her hum and her sigh drowning out whatever music is playing in the background, and for an undefinable amount of time they stand together, press of mouth and push of tongue, her hands skating from his back to his chest and up around his shoulders where she drapes herself.

“I love you too,” she murmurs when the kiss breaks for breath, for the gust of two threads of laughter, and he takes the hand from her hair to run fingertips along her temple, to tuck a sheaf of blonde behind her ear.

“Damn well better,” he grins, kissing her again. Again and again, because _Fuck it,_ he thinks. _I’ve done as best I can, but there’s no keeping me from her now._ She keeps laughing into mouth and he thinks maybe he’s died and gone to heaven, here with a smear of strawberry across his mouth, with the nip of her teeth and the curve of her smile against his.

Time starts again, the swell of music returns to his ears when they pull away, foreheads resting together and he’s out of breath like he just ran a marathon with his face in her hands, her fingers in his hair, and _this_ is what it’s supposed to have been this whole time, but he’s here now, she’s here now and it’s _good._

“Hey, fuck you, man,” he hears Renly say, and he lifts his head, looking down at Margie, and their share a look of bewildered confusion, because it’s anger and negativity, it’s such a shocking contrast to the way the rest of the evening feels. He glances back over his shoulder in time to see Meryn shove Loras, a dick move in any setting but a dangerous one tonight, considering how close they stand to the fire. Loras catches himself before he falls, and Renly pushes past him, a hand on his boyfriend’s chest to keep him back. It’s protective and kind but there is rage in Renly’s eyes.

“Fuckin’ faggots, take it somewhere else, man,” Boros says, and Margie gasps in mortification, and before he knows what he’s doing he feels the absence of her in his hands when he turns away from her, storming towards the scuffle, and just as Renly punches Meryn, who’s coming in for another attack on Loras, Bronn draws back his fist and clocks Boros square in the face.

“That’s my girlfriend’s brother you’re talking about, asshole,” he says, and the bloom of pain in his fist is nothing to the pain in his cheekbone when Boros hits him back, Margie’s scream his backdrop as he staggers to the side from the impact. Renly and Loras pull a one-two on Meryn, Loras slugging him in the stomach before Renly knees him in the face once he’s doubled over, and Bronn is bracing himself for another hit when Sandor charges down the slope and shoves Boros so hard in the back he falls forward with his face and his dick in the dirt.

“That’s my friend’s girlfriend’s brother you’re talking about, you cunts,” he hurls out, kicking Boros in the ribs, fists clenched in anger. “Now get the fuck off my property, both of you. Nobody invited you and nobody wants you here.” Margie runs up to him once Boros and Meryn pick their sorry asses up and slink off, leaving expletives and slurs in their wakes, and she is a warm presence at his side when he pulls her in with an arm across her shoulders, and she laces her fingers into his, pulling his hand into her chest.

“I’ve wanted to beat that fucker for the longest time,” Sandor says, glaring in the direction they headed, and he stares until they all hear two car doors slam, until the roar of their truck rumbles off towards the road. Bronn remembers the camping story, knows both Boros and Meryn were there, and now he’s half sorry they left without broken bones.

“To be honest, I’m pretty happy I got a punch in myself,” Loras says as Renly slings an arm over his shoulders.

“Now _that_ is the sign of a good party,” Jaime says, and for some reason it makes everyone laugh, even Sandor.

“Are you okay?” Margie asks as they head to the coolers for a couple of beers, and he grins to look down at her, here under his arm where she belongs.

“Yeah, honey, I’m okay. Nothing a few more drinks can’t fix,” and then someone changes the music and it’s his beloved Brooks and Dunn, and he and Margie sit in the bed of his old man’s truck, and he ignores for the most part the shouts of _It’s about time_ and _I knew it,_ because he’s got her in his lap and her mouth against his, and he thinks _Yeah, it’s about time._

 

They stay up until the sunrise, the glow of the dying fire slowly overtaken by the glow of dawn, and the stragglers watch it rise in near silence save for the clink of the occasional empty beer can. Sandor gazes at the sun with his hands shoved in his pockets as he stands by the greenhouse, his hair pulled away from his face in a short ponytail, and the dawn paints the scars on the left side of his face with pretty pinks and oranges, and she wonders if he’d believe her, if she told him they look pretty in this light. Bronn’s got his back resting against the rear window of the cab and she’s sitting between his legs in the bed of his truck, his cocked knees her armrests as she reclines against his chest. His fingers are a trace down her arm or a drift in her hair, a slide across her stomach beneath her shirt where he raises a riot of goose bumps in the post-dawn chill.

Margie falls asleep after he pulls an old blanket over them, a scratchy thing covered in dead grass that they use when they’re digging on their knees. They scoot down and stretch out, and she’s grateful for the plastic bed liner as she rests her head on his chest, as her eyes drowse shut beneath the lacework rays of early morning sunlight above them. The blanket is scratchy but it smells like the earth, smells like _home_ and like him, and as she drifts off she’s smiling about how those two seem to be turning into the same thing, here where his heart beats beneath her ear.

“Wake up, honey,” he says sometime later, and they’re mostly protected by the wind back here in the truck, and so it’s a warm little cocoon of Bronn and Margie, of blankets and _love_ , because that’s what he said to her last night, what she finally got to admit to him.

She _Mmphs_ as she sits up, the wind a sudden kick into her hair, sending a cool lick of breeze down the back of her shirt, and it’s like being in the middle of nowhere when she looks around. Everything is gone, the coolers and the beer, the flames and the trucks, and it’s just the two of them here with a half built greenhouse on the bottom of a lazy little hill. Margie smiles.

“Everyone left, I guess,” she says, gazing back down and behind her where Bronn still lies half asleep. He grimaces as he stretches, finally sitting up beside her and looking around like a puppy who’s just been woken up. It’s a beautiful day already, white stretch of earth beneath a robin’s egg sky, studded throughout with those fat clouds that look like cotton candy or big fluffy sheep, a true summer day that looks like it leaped right off of a postcard.

“The only person I give a shit about’s right here next to me,” Bronn grins, leaning in to kiss her, but she turns her head away and digs in her purse for a piece of gum, popping it in her mouth and chewing. She’s never slept next to a guy before and she’ll be damned if she’s going to let morning breath ruin it, and he laughs at her while he watches her jaws work. “You gonna give me a piece of that or what?” he asks finally, and she nods, reaching to the purse at her side, but then he’s got her chin between his finger and thumb, and Bronn holds her in place as he kisses her, and before she knows it he’s a sweep and a flick of the tongue, one she responds to despite her earlier protestation. The sun is a kiss and the wind an embrace, she is in the middle of a sea of grass on this Chevy island of a truck, and when Bronn finally draws back and breaks the kiss he’s chewing her gum.

“Hey!” she says, and he laughs, always a laugh with him, always a grin and a wink even with the bloom of a bruise of his left cheek. They put their boots and sneakers back on, legs dangling off the back of the open tail gate as they look around for any stray beer cans, but Sandor, presumably the cleanup crew for the party, was thorough, which is to be expected considering how proud he is of his stretch of land. Five acres now, five acres within as many years, and then the whole far corner of Barristan’s land will be his.

“Come have breakfast at my place,” Bronn says when he stands, turning back to her, and there is a spark of interest when he pushes her legs apart with his hands, sliding them up her thighs to cup her ass, to pull her against him. Margie winds her arms around him, clasping her forearms to keep him locked in close, and she tries to steal her gum back with the same cleverness he used. She sighs when his hands slide up under her shirt, two palms skating up either side of her spine, and it inspires her to do the same. He is _warm_ , smooth skin and curve of muscle over bone, and just this little touch, this step they take to close the distance is enough to heat her up.

“Okay, Bronny,” she sighs when he breaks away to kiss her throat down to her shoulder, pushing the strap of her tank top aside to give her a nip, and she lets her head sag back to blink up at the sun-scatter of clouds.

“You taste like sunshine,” he murmurs across her skin, against her mouth when he rights his head, and it is power and weakness in one to see him so hungry for her, to feel as starved for love as he is.

“You feel like home,” she says, too wound up in him and fizzy-tired from lack of sleep to keep it to herself, and he hums with a smile before pressing a kiss to her forehead.

“Good,” he says, and then she’s driving after him off Sandor’s property towards his house, wind in her hair and sun on her shoulders, and she thinks of how she tastes like sunshine, and she’s grinning when they pull up the driveway, chickens a scurry out of the way, dog tails wagging, two of them barking at the appearance of her Jeep as it lumbers up behind Bronn’s truck.

She leaps up on his back when he’s not looking her way, too busy petting his three legged dog, and he _Oofs_ with a laugh, asks her if he’s her new pony, and he’s spinning her around with his hands tucked up in the bend of her knees, making her shriek like she’s on a carnival ride when there is the slap of the screen door and Sandor is striding out to them.

“Bronn, it’s your dad,” he says, and they are a dizzy slow standstill as he carefully lets her down off his back, and she watches as he stands in mute confusion, instant concern, and she can’t think of what could happen to his dad when he’s so young, barely out of his forties, but then she remembers Bronn’s t-shirts flapping on a line, airing out in the backyard.

“Honey, do you want me to go home?” she asks, figuring now is a time for privacy, that no one wants company when the shit hits the fan, but he shakes his head as he looks down at her, takes her hand with his and laces his fingers to hers.

“No, stay. Don’t leave me, Margie,” and he pulls her towards him as he follows Sandor back in the house, pulls her completely into his life, and she goes willingly.

“What’s wrong?” he asks as they walk inside, and Sandor shakes his head with a shrug.

“There’s just, he’s coughing up a lot of blood,” his friend replies, grey eyes serious, mouth set in a line amidst the scruff of facial hair. Margie turns to look up at Bronn, who for the first time since she’s met him looks stricken. _No,_ she thinks, _he looks scared._


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by Big Bad World by Kodaline, and I highly recommend you give it a listen. XOXO
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> [PICSET](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/107511105743/one-fine-summer-chapter-7-feels)

Jonn Blackwater dies midmorning on a seasonably crisp day in November, and Bronn is there by his hospice bed, head bowed as he imagines his old man’s soul being sucked skyward from the room. His father’s hand is ashen in his own, skin thin like the pages of that bible he kept in his nightstand. He cannot remember the last time he and his father held hands.

The final time his dad spoke it was to leave parting words, and Bronn shook his head violently to hear his voice, because he knew what it meant. His dad was parceling out wisdoms, final gifts to leave on the doorsteps of his loved ones before packing up and heading out to whatever was waiting for him on the other side. Bronn hoped for tall grasses and sunshine, hoped he finds a horse to ride until Penny gets there to be with her number one buddy, hoped there’s not a goddamn cigarette or packaging factory in sight.

_Work hard enough to take care of what you love, son, but don’t, don’t, just not too hard, y’hear?_

_You never have to worry about that with me, dad._

_Don’t be so hard on yourself, Bronn. You’re a hard worker. Just promise me you won’t ever_ live _to work. Live to live, to love. Work to pay the bills and nothing more. Feed Penny and ride her for me. Don’t let the chickens in the house. I love you, son. You’ve done me proud. Take care of that girl of yours, and don’t let Sandor drift too far away from rest of the world. Keep him with you._

Bronn told him he would on all accounts and then his father sighed with a small, sad smile and a nod, utter resignation to a fate that he himself would flail and thrash against with all he had, but then he supposed Jonn likely gave up a long time ago.

It doesn’t remove the deep, fathomless ache of pain now, a Sunday afternoon where the reverend says his little piece on the whitewash of grass here in a cemetery in Elgin, the mourners standing around the gravesite like carrion birds, dressed in black to surround the dead. _He’s at peace,_ they tell him. _He’s no longer in pain,_ they soothe. Bronn wants to shove them, to yell _Yeah but he’s dead, he doesn’t fucking exist anymore. There’s a dent in his mattress but he’s gone for good._

Still, he does not cry. It’s with dry eyes he watches as they lower Jonn’s casket, and man, did that set Bronn back, the cost of it and this shit show they call a funeral. Everything he’s scraped together in the near 18 months since his dad fell ill has gone to his father’s care, time spent back and forth between Tucson hospitals and Sierra Vista hospices, between home and the warehouse he and Sandor cleared out and remodeled as befitting a nursery.  What little money that came in from the new enterprise all went to Jonn’s care, Sandor insisting upon it with stony faced sincerity that bordered on the sentimental. And now he’s burying it with his father. Several thousand dollars and the only family he has left, gone and buried in a hole in the ground.

He drives the shovel into the dirt with a press of his foot against the shoulder of it, lifts and dumps the soil on his father’s coffin, waiting only for Sandor to follow suit, and then turns on his heel and walks away.

“Bronny, wait,” Margie says, a breathless wisp on the wind, a two legged shuffle through the grass, a shiver under the pale late autumn sun. He walks on, chin tucked to his chest, though he lets her take his hand when she catches up to him, stops when she puts her other hand on his bicep, giving it a soft squeeze. “Hey, what- how can I- what do you want, right now? What do you need?”

“I’m supposed to host a fucking reception right now,” he says, and the strength suddenly leaves him. He kept his shit together for the entire service, the entire drive from Sonoita Bible Church to the cemetery, stood straight backed and dry-eyed and silent throughout the _second_ service graveside, but it’s enough, now. His shoulders slump and he sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Sandor can host it, _I_ can host it, Renly, Loras, any one of us,” she says. “He’s _your_ dad, Bronn, screw what you’re “supposed” to do, do what you _have_ to do, what you need to do for _you._ I’ll help,” she says, and it’s right here, this moment when he turns towards her and all but collapses on top of her, his head and shoulders bowing over hers, and she catches him with a small exhalation, runs her fingers through his hair while the other hand rubs his back, up and down as if he were a small child and not a grown man five inches taller than she.

“I want to go home and I want to be left alone,” he says, and she murmurs complacencies and nods against his shoulder, her loose hair a rub against the side of his face, smoothly shaven for his father’s funeral.

“I’ll drop you off at home, okay? I’ll tell Sandor to—” but he grunts out a _No_ , lifts his head to look at her.

“No. Come _with_ me. I don’t want, I want to be alone but not _that_ alone,” he says, voice cracking like a school boy’s as he looks at her. She looks so somber and severe, dressed head to toe in black when he’s so used to color on her, but her blue eyes are wide and full of love for him, and so there’s comfort in that, in the feel of her here with him. “Say you’ll stay.”

“Of course I’ll stay. You just go on now, go warm up the Jeep for me,” she says, digging the keys out of her purse, black to match the dress, black to the honor the dead. He nods and takes them from her, gets in the passenger side once he turns over the engine, and from inside her zipped up soft top he watches her take care of him. She picks her way through the soil and grass to where Sandor still stands, a great looming watchdog standing by Jonn’s temporary tombstone, head bowed and hands in his pockets, wind plucking at his tied back hair. Margie tugs his sleeve and he looks at her, lowering his head as she tiptoes up to talk in his ear. Even from here he can see Sandor nod, and then Margie is a careful trot back to the snake of asphalt that cuts through the cemetery where everyone has parked.

She takes him home and to his room, tells him to take his shoes off and lie down before heading into the kitchen, and when he takes off his only pair of dress shoes, though they’ve treated him well the past several years he’s had them, Bronn throws them in his trash can. He’ll not carry the dirt from his father’s grave into future parts of his life, and half of him wants to stuff his suitcoat in the trash too, but there’s no room, so he simply throws it on the floor. He’s on his stomach and chest in the center of his bed, face shoved in the crack between the two pillows when she comes in, and he can hear the dull clunk of a glass or a mug, the rattle of a dish being set down on his nightstand. And then he thinks he sleeps, and it’s as black as the clothes he wears.

It’s dusk when he wakes up with a sharp intake of breath, a scrub of a palm to his face. It’s soot-grey in here, the sundress blocking what little light remains outside, and it’s muzzy and confusing, this ache in his heart, until he remembers that his father has died, that they buried him today.

“Oh,” he says stupidly, propping himself on his elbows to press the heels of his palms against his eyes, but then there is a shift next to him on the mattress and his head flies up, eyes open to look over, to register and remember. It’s Margie, a little blackbird in her dress, stretched out beside him on her back, face tipped towards him, and he wonders if she fell asleep too or has been watching over him this whole time. He thinks of Sandor by the grave, watching over his old man, and here’s Margie, standing vigil over his heart.

“Hi, baby,” she says after she reaches back behind her to turn on his bedside lamp, voice soft as those expensive sweaters she wears, her hand a wash of warmth when it coasts down his back.

“What happened,” he says, voice a mumble like a mouth full of marbles, looking up from her to glance around the room. There’s a cup of water and a sandwich on a plate behind her on his nightstand next to his alarm clock, and he almost smiles; _a nursemaid at seventeen_.

“Sandor held the reception in the barn. After you fell asleep I went out there for a little bit. Everyone was really nice,” she murmurs, running her fingers down the side of his face. She frowns, shakes her head, starts over. “I mean, they were very understanding about you staying inside, so I don’t want you to think you’ve done something wrong, okay?”

“Thank you,” he says as she nods, and he tips his weight back on his left elbow so he can pull her into him with his free arm. She comes willingly, scooting over so he can rest his head on her chest, hear a heartbeat, confirm she’s living, breathing, here with him and not some specter. She is flowery perfume and warm skin housed in a black dress, arms wound around him, hair another bloom of scent when he lifts his head to kiss her collarbone.

Warm, soft, sweet.

He opens his mouth against the bare skin of her throat, steady pulse beneath the path of his tongue, and there is a hitch in her breath at the contact, a tightening of her hands on his back, fists full of his dress shirt. He wishes she would rip it off and tear into his skin. Anything but this hurt.

“Margie,” he says, and whether it’s a plea or a prayer he doesn’t know, a sigh of ecstasy or a cry of despair, but he drops his kisses from her neck to the collar of her dress, nips at the fabric to try and reach _her_ because he needs her and there’s all this silk between them. His kisses become hotter, heavier, and he moves a hand from her waist down to her thighs, dragging at the skirt of her dress, pulling it up to her hips before his palm runs up her stomach to squeeze a breast, and now he’s got her moving.

“Bronn,” she sighs, but he’s burying his face between her breasts, mouth open, hungry, _wanting_ , wanting anything but the feel of this day and what it means, the pain that radiates out of him. He will whip her up, he will get her to meet him here, hot and ready so he can just _forget_ already. But then a sob wracks her body, a tremor he feels through his own, and he jerks up, terrified he’s hurting her. “Oh, honey,” she says when he looks up at her, and then he realizes it’s he who’s crying, that it’s _his_ face slick with tears, that the body wracked with sobs is his own.

He falls apart.

“He’s gone, Margie. Jesus Christ, he’s really gone,” and he drops his head back to the softness of her, an arm sliding beneath her neck, his other arm burying itself between her back and the mattress. He’s got nothing but the sound of his own weeping here, nothing but the feel of her fingers combing through his hair, the sweep of her hand up and down his back until finally she just wraps her arms around him, holds him until he sobs himself ragged, until he cries himself to sleep the way he used to in his father’s bed.

 

She dreams in black and white, of tears and desperate men, of stone-faced mourning and the whickering of horses mingling with the sniffling sounds of mourning. She dreams of a horrible pounding, a yelling and a _thudthudthud_ , but then her dreaming self looks up to the gray sky of slumber with a frown, and suddenly Margie wakes up. They are locked in the same position they were in when they fell asleep; Bronn drifted off first, half drowning and swept to sleep by his own tears, and she long after when she was convinced he was finally at rest, her dress a drench from his crying. She lifts her head to press a kiss to the crown of his, that duckling dander of sandy blonde, and he’s barely a stir even though the room is full of morning light.

Her heart broke for him last night, how he went from half-awake to on fire, only to put himself out with the salt of his own tears, with wave after wave of impossible grief, how mid-kiss he tore apart with the force of a cracking cry. The only other time she saw a grown man cry was a year ago after Willas’s accident when their father thought he was dead beneath the weight of his half-broken horse. That was horrifying to witness, the way Loras and her dad carried her brother to the main house, but there is no fear here, no adrenaline of terror, just the heavy, damp weight of grieving, of sorrow, of loss. She kisses his head again, smoothes his hair before letting her own head drop back to the pillow; it is exhausting work, loving someone and holding them up through this pain, and she feels it in her bones, but if he needs her to hold him all day then God help her she wi—

“Margie, wake up! I know you’re in there!” _Oh God, it’s Loras. Oh_ God, _that’s right, it’s Monday morning,_ and with a sick drop of her stomach she remembers she has school today.

“Wake up, Bronny, wake up,” she says, patting his shoulder as he grunts and groans, lifts his head, showing her a face red and puffy from his misery, and her heart hurts for him, she feels actual _pain_ for him, but she’s about to be in deep shit and she has to get her ass in gear.

“What’s the matter,” he says, rolling off of her onto his back, rubbing his face with his hands, but then he hears Loras at the door, the pounding of his fist and the holler of his voice. He sits up, quick like a jack in the box, with a burst of energy as he gets to his feet, striding to the door as Margie hastily shoves her black heels on her feet and grabs her purse. A single glance in the bathroom mirror tells her she looks like a wreck, and she swears under her breath before click-clacking down the wood floors of the hallway where she catches up to him, pushing past him as gently as she can, opening the unlocked door herself. Her brother’s wearing an old pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt, a far cry from the funeral blacks she and Bronn are in, and it only further entrenches the scandal of her falling asleep here.

“Did you forget school, you knucklehead?” but then he glances at the two of them, their disheveled clothes and the wild mess of her hair. “Oh wow, Margie.”

“It’s not like that, all right? He was, I mean he um, I was just here to comfort him. _And not like that,_ ” she snaps when Loras’s eyebrows shoot up on his forehead, but then there is a ragged sigh behind her, torn like a flag in a storm, and she looks over her shoulder. He’s wilted, faded, hollowed out, and she whimpers _Oh, Bronn_ before he speaks.

“I bawled my eyes out like a big baby and she let me, okay? She’ll get to class, it can’t be _that_ late,” he says, glancing around dazedly for a clock, finding none here in the doorway. He’s a lost puppy, a lost child, and she wonders if he even registers where they are right now.

“It’s past _nine,_ Margie. I told mom and dad you slept over at Ellie’s to study for some biology exam or something,” he says, but she interrupts him with a groan.

“Lor, I’m not taking biology this year, that’s a freshman class,” she says. “As if you weren’t a senior like five seconds ago.” Margie sighs, rubs her hands up her face and up into her hair, drawing it away from her face before opening her eyes. “Oh _shit.”_

“You’re telling _me,_ ‘Oh shit,’ so you better high tail it to class before your reported as absent and they call mom and dad,” Loras snaps, but Margie just shakes her head in mute terror.

“They already _did_ call mom and dad,” their father says behind Loras, her mother a pillar of ice queen dignity and anger to find her here. “Which is why we followed you when you ran out of the house after your little biology exam lie.”

 _Oh God, this is horrible,_ she thinks ten minutes later, sitting on the sofa in the living room, her father shouting at a defeated looking Bronn who is standing with his head bowed, nodding every so often as Mace spits out things like _You’ll never do business in town again_ and _I trusted you with my daughter to teach her driving and now come to find out you’ve been messing around with her._ But that’s the last straw, and finally she stands up, fists clenched at her side.

“We have _never_ messed around, dad, he barely even _kissed_ me a year ago,” she snaps, a fire crackle of anger in her voice, but she is her father’s daughter, after all, and Mace doesn’t back down. Instead, he wheels around to glare at Bronn with the same intensity his genes passed down to her.

“Oh so you’ve been _kissing_ my daughter, huh? And am I supposed to believe that that’s _all,_ that you haven’t taken things any further, especially _now_ that she’s sleeping over at your house? On a fucking school night no less,” he roars, fists clenched like his daughter’s as he glares at her, temper for temper, fuming expression for fuming expression.

“Mace, watch your language,” Alerie snaps from where she stands by the door, arms folded across her chest as she listens to all of this, Loras a silent, horrified statue beside her.

“Mom, please, you’ve got to believe me, we haven’t _done_ anything. His- I mean, you have to have heard that his dad just died, okay? The funeral was yesterday, and he was really cut up about it, all right? I just, I couldn’t leave him alone,” Margie says, tears springing to her eyes as she thinks about last night; she will never forget the sounds of him crying. Her mother regards her coolly but with studying interest.

“You told me you were going to Meredyth’s,” her mom says evenly after a few moments. “You lied so you could attend a funeral? I _am_ sorry about your loss, by the way,” she says in an aside to Bronn, not unkindly, and he nods mutely.

“Yes,” Margie says, edging to where Bronn stands, slipping her hand in his with tentative hope, that maybe her parents will see there is love here, not lust, not fooling around like her dad says, but then Mace’s gaze drops to their entwined fingers, and Bronn wrenches his hand from hers when her father bellows _OH-HO, you think so, boy?_ and Margie is about to scream when her father advances on him.

“I’m gay,” Loras blurts as he steps fully into the room, looking their father square in the face when he spins around to stare in shock and disbelief at his son.

“I, you’re, I’m sorry, what the fuck,” Mace starts, but Alerie cuts him off with another whip-crack of _Mace, language,_ and he shakes his head, actually shakes his head as if to clear out his hearing. “You’re, you’re,” he starts, unable to finish.

“Gay, dad. I’m gay.  I like guys, and I love one in particular. I like to kiss him and hug him and tell him I love him, and _he_ loves me back,” he says, head back and chin up, as imperious as their mother who is staring at him with an unreadable expression on her face, and it sounds like a rush of relief to say the words he has never said to their parents. “So if you want to freak out on anyone in this family, it’s probably me, because I’m seeing an older guy too and _we’re_ actually sleeping together,” he finishes finally, and she suppresses the wild urge to laugh at this bold admittance. When Margie slides a glance to Bronn he’s got his mouth open and his eyes bugged out, and that only serves to make her bite her tongue harder, because now is _not_ the time.

Her father is a blubbering flustered mess of _Well I don’t even- I just can’t- how can you stand there saying that kind of- between the two of you- this never happened with your brother,_ and then finally he flings his hands in the air and turns on his heel to storm out, slamming shut the screen door so ferociously it bounces three times against its frame. Her mom takes a long, slow, deep inhalation of breath as she walks into the room to stand by the coffee table, between her two children while she faces Bronn. She lets her breath out with regal patience.

“You’re telling me that since you met my daughter, since you two have, hmm, developed this romantic relationship, you have not spoiled her or had your way with her?” Margie closes her eyes, murmurs _Mother_ under her breath, because this is mortifying, makes her sound like an utter child, like a piece of unripe fruit. Bronn breathes in deep as well and speaks after the sigh.

“I swear to God, Mrs. Tyrell. And I’ll be honest, it’s nearly killed me but no, we’ve never taken it that far,” he says, all resignation and bald truth, no grins or jokes, no winks or twinkles in his eyes. It is frank, spoken with a shrug and a flat guileless voice, and when she looks up she can see the misery that sort of restraint has been for him, mingling with this fresher and far more profound pain. Margie takes his hand in hers again, and this time Bronn squeezes it, doesn’t let her go or shy away from her; instead he straightens his spine and gazes right back at her mother. Alerie glances down at their clasped hands, then back up to Bronn in unabashed appraisal, and finally, finally after several seconds she nods.

“All right, then. I’ll talk to your father, Margie,” she says. It is a burst and a soar, a caged animal being set free the way her heart expands with relief. Half a half dozen _thank yous_ fly out of her mouth, and then she pushes her luck.

“Can I stay here with him, please? Can I stay just today? I’ll be home for dinner,” she says hastily when her mother arches an expertly shaped brow at her, and Bronn says _Margie_ with a warning edge to his voice, but then her mom glances at him again. Sandor has probably been out of the house since sunrise, and the empty stillness of this place around them seems to speak to her, giving her its own opinion of the sorry state Bronn finds himself in, because she rolls her eyes with another sigh.

“Fine,” she says, but before there is time to react to this relatively happy news, Alerie turns to the other child of hers in the room. “As for you,” she says, planting her hands on her hips, “you’re grounded.” Margie and Loras both say _Mom, come on_ in unison.

“I’m 19, you can’t ground me, plus I have an afternoon class today at the U,” he says with a scoff that suggests more confidence than he’s likely feeling, because the bomb he’s dropped is a big one, and the happy family life they’ve always known is hanging in the balance. It was a massive sword to fall on, one of his own design and all to help her out, to sweep in and draw some of their father’s fire and brimstone his way. _My sweet brother,_ she thinks.

“You _should_ be grounded,” she snaps, or at least she tries to but there is a wet warble to her mother’s voice, and then once more Bronn’s house has the tune of sorrow to fill its modest rooms when she starts crying. Alerie’s back is turned to Margie but she sees a reflection of raw emotion that shines in Loras’s eyes, and suddenly he is yanked nearly off his feet and into a tight embrace, and he stares with wide eyed surprise at his sister over their mother’s shoulder. It would be comical if it weren’t for the love spilling out of their mother in that moment, her hand a press to the back of Loras’s head, a kiss pressed to his cheek as she speaks against his stubble. “How _dare_ you wait so long to tell me. I’m your mother, Loras, you never have to keep your heart hidden from me.”

 

It takes a full two weeks before he’s got the gumption to see his dad’s permanent tombstone, and he grooms and saddles Penny slowly, taking as much time and care as his father did for his old lady, the only one who decided to stick around in the end. He already took saddle soap to Jonn’s tack and now he takes a step back to regard the final result when she’s bridled and saddled, nodding finally with approval, and Penny snorts and nods right back. He chuckles, brief but genuine, gives the horse a pat on her glossy neck before buttoning up his thick winter coat and adjusting the baseball hat on his head. Bronn gives the incredulous Nugget a pat on the jowl as he leads her past him.

“Come on, old girl, let’s go say hi to him together,” he says as he pulls himself up in the saddle, and it takes nothing but the lightest press of his heels into her sides to amble away from the barn.

Though he lacks his father’s gentle persuasion to get her up into a gallop, to get her blood pumping and maybe his too a little, he can finally cluck and cajole her into a lope, and it takes less than 20 minutes before he’s reining her in on the outskirts of the cemetery. The rickety picket fence is like the frill of a woman’s skirt, those white cotton things Margie wears in the spring, and while the sight of it, the soft thought of it should be a comfort, he finds he’s stuck, rooted to the spot. He can see near the center of the cemetery the fresh mound of earth of his father’s grave, a wound in the flesh of the earth, and he feels stabbed himself.

“Don’t give your old man the snub, now,” Sandor says in his deep, unmistakable voice, two lava rocks grinding against each other, and Bronn twists in the saddle to see him trotting up on Nugget, long hair tied back beneath the cowboy hat Jonn gave to him before he died. He wanted to do this alone but the sight of his friend floods him with relief.

“I was just waiting for your sorry ass,” he says, dismounting and slinging the reins between two pickets of the fence, and it’s short enough to post himself over, and once Sandor heaves his large frame off of Nugget he simply swings one long leg over it. Together, shoulder to shoulder, they pick their way carefully between the older established graves until they’re face to face with a stone that reads Jonn Blackwater, beloved father, born and died in Sonoita, AZ, a birthdate half a century ago, date of death just this year.

“He was a good man, Bronn,” Sandor says, and they are not men who hug but when Sandor lays a heavy hand on his shoulder he nods, is thankful for the touch and the thought.

“Yeah, he was,” he says finally, and they stand together, side by side, gazing down and paying respects as the last of autumn swirls and rustles around them. It’s the swish of horses’ tails and the occasional whicker or snort behind them, the slow scrawl of the sun in the sky overhead and the clouds that bump into each other until the sunny day becomes cloudy. They stand in silence, no more words spoken, so he fills it with all of his goodbyes and his gratitude as they roll around inside his head, and he tries his best to cast them out so the wind can carry them to wherever his dad rides now, wherever Jonn Blackwater may be ambling about on this grey November afternoon.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/107625921508/one-fine-summer-chapter-8-feels)

She’s pruning her roses, oranges and pinks and yellows, reds and whites and the lone lavender they managed to track down, when Loras and Renly are a bang and slam through the French doors with a  _THERE’S OUR GIRL._ She jumps, startled out of hazy spring fever thoughts, out of the ache of a memory that’s days old and all the richer for it. Bronn kissing his way down her belly last Saturday night, head beneath her dress, how she gasped high and thin with her back arching out of the grass when his kisses hit her southernmost point and stayed there until she sighed out his name.

“Jesus, you scared the hell out of me,” she says, mental images dissipating like incense smoke, the pruning shears a narrow miss of clipping her fingers. She cannot help but slap her brother in the chest with the small handful of long stem roses in her hands, and the air between them is filled with the perfume of cherishment and adoration, the intoxicating aroma of love.

“You’ll forgive me in about three seconds,” he says, his smack of a thick white envelope on her chest a mirror, an echo of her assault of flowers. Loras plucks the roses from her hand and hands them to Renly, who grins like a cat and takes them, inhaling the headiness and raising his eyebrows in approval. She flicks a narrow-eyed glance between the two of them, snatching the envelope from her brother’s hands, not trusting them one bit, not after they threw her into the pool only two months ago, when it was a bitter February evening and there was snow falling into the blue green water. But then Margie sees  _University of Arizona_  on the upper left hand corner, and she gasps, gazing up to where Loras and Renly are watching her, Renly’s arm slung across Loras’s shoulder as he idly smells his impromptu bouquet, and they wear grins so identical she has to wonder if they practice in the mirror.

“Rejection letters don’t come in big fancy manila envelopes, sugar,” Renly says, nodding towards the mail she’s got in hands that are a sudden tremble. She gazes down at it, her future, or at least a part of it.

“And they don’t tend to send a bunch of brochures and glossy pamphlets with a  _Thanks, no thanks_ letter, either,” Loras adds.

“Oh my God,” she says, digging the fingernail of her forefinger into the little notch of space in the corner, and with a half feral drag she tears it open, pulls the thick sheaf of papers, brochures, multi-colored sheets of paper out of the envelope before tossing the latter to the grass at her feet.  _We are pleased to inform you,_  and that’s all she needs to read before she screams and tosses the papers in the air like glossy confetti, and Loras sweeps in and lifts her to spin her around.

“College co-eds!” he says, and she whoops a victory cry, thrusting her closed fists in the air and tipping her head back. Margie prides herself on getting what she wants, but even she has to admit, albeit only to herself, that applying to just one college was a bit of a risk.

“I did it,” she laughs, dizzy from the swirl of clouds and sun and blue, but then he’s moving, and she’s shrieking  _Loras, don’t you fucking dare,_  because they’re headed towards the pool and her brother is cackling like a devil beneath her.

“Loras, don’t be such a jerk,” Renly says, and she looks at him in time to see his wicked grin as he shoves Loras on the back, and brother and sister topple into the pool, the water still a chilly shock this early in the season, and she’s in her favorite jeans and just washed and did her hair, but this time Margie finds she just doesn’t give a damn.

Her father insists on taking the entire family to dinner in celebration of their third and youngest child becoming a Wildcat, just like their mom and dad, their grandmother before them, and so it’s a two car caravan up to Sullivan’s Steakhouse in the foothills of Tucson. Her parents drink martinis and eat oysters on the half shell in the piano bar while Willas chats up the bartender, nursing a gin buck that he lets her sip off of when her parents aren’t looking. It’s toast after toast over tomahawk steaks and filet mignons, buttery sides that cost $12 a piece and an almost disturbingly decadent, oozing chocolate dessert that makes her shake her head in refusal after three bites.

Her parents insist she ride with them on the way home, letting her brothers speed ahead down the interstate back home, and she watches the fading zoom of Loras’s Mustang fly out of sight ahead of them with a wistful sigh.

“So Margie, are you going to live up in the dorms like Willas did? Just think of all the stuff you could photograph,” her dad says. “The prettiest campus around, a big downtown, all those people,” he says, glancing at her in the rearview, his face illuminated by the headlights of oncoming cars. She shrugs though it’s likely he can’t see it.

“I don’t know, the idea of moving away from Sonoita has started to kind of lose its appeal,” she says, gazing out at the black outside her window, and Mace huffs. He knows the reason why, shaped like a broad shouldered man with a faded old baseball hat she bought him a hundred years ago, earth under his nails and the love of his town in his eyes. She’s bathed in that reflection of love for two years now, and it’s soaked through her skin and into her hair, worked its way into her heart. She’ll never want to be a farmer, but rambling around the slopes and scruffs of Sonoita with a camera around her neck doesn’t sound so bad, anymore. The rustle of the grasses beneath her feet beats the honking and expletives in Tucson’s five o’clock traffic; shade tree oaks clustered like gossiping old women along the wash lines are far more captivating to her than the handful of high rise buildings in the city downtown, even with the sun winking and glittering against the metal and glass.

“You’re going to commute like Loras?” her mother asks with a half twist to face her, eyebrows up. “It’s an hour drive, Margie, each way.” There is another question here that Margie has yet to know the answer to, so for now she answers the surfaced one, bookmarking, for the time being, the underlying.

“He schedules all his classes in the middle of the day to avoid rush hour,” she says lightly, noncommittally, drumming her fingers on the passenger door armrest. “I’ll figure it out. I’m not ready to leave, yet,” she says, and then she grins. “Hey, I was thinking of sleeping over at Alysanne’s, is that cool?”

 

Nighttime breezes still carry a memory of late winter even in April, so Bronn’s burrowed under three quilts to have the best of both worlds, warmth and fresh air, though it has been seven months since this house required a constant circulation of the latter. Old habits die hard, however, which is why he’s used to the whinny and snort of horses, the rustling of Sandor in the living room, the movement of dogs and maybe an antelope or two passing by if the dogs are sleeping inside. So even though he is nearly asleep the sound of a horse chewing its bit just outside his window is nothing, no more startles him than Sandor’s upward flick of his bedroom light every morning at dawn.

“Nugget, how’d you get out, you bastard,” he mumbles against his pillow, squeezing his eyes tight before opening them and turning towards his window, but while there’s a horse painted in moonlight just outside it’s not Nugget. He grins, though, because he’s got the sight of Margie pushing past her sundress as she climbs over the sill of his bedroom window, the edge of her panties just visible when her low rise jeans dip low as she swings her other leg over. “This has to be a dream,” he says as she rights herself in his room, a silhouette of long hair, painted grey in this light.

“Not a dream, just me,” she says, and he huffs a laugh because she clearly doesn’t understand how he sees her, that she’s both, ever since she shoved him down to his ass three years ago, nearly to the day if he bothered thinking about.

“Whose horse is that, anyways?” he says, watching as she tugs the sweatshirt over her head, and he is granted the gift of seeing her in nothing but jeans and a dark colored bra.

“Alysanne’s. I said I was sleeping over there. I’m  _freezing_ ,” she says, and he’s already got the covers lifted for her, and she pushes down the back of one sneaker with the toe of the other as she pulls her foot out, repeating the process with the other before pulling off her socks and sliding in beside him. She’s a shiver and a burrow against his bare chest, and he yips and hisses when he feels her cold hands against his skin. “Ooh, you’re so  _warm,_ ” she says richly.

“Not for long with those ice cubes you call fingers,” he says, drawing her in despite his admonishment. “What’re you doing here, honey, it’s Friday, not Saturday,” he says, and there is a sweet memory of making her moan in the grass; he fully intended to do it all over again tomorrow night, to keep that high going, that thrill of potential discovery, that thrill of her nails dragging against his scalp.

“I got accepted to the U,” she says, burrowing her face beneath his chin, and here Bronn stills a moment, despite the press of her cold little nose against his clavicle. It’s the fear that’s been mounting inside his heart since she started her senior year last fall, knowing full well she’s too clever to pull weeds and plant shrubs like he does, too vibrant to sit drumming her nails as she lurks around a two horse town.  _More like a one horse town,_  he thinks as he rubs his bed-warmed hands up and down her back, the band of her bra a lacy ruffle under his palm.

“Of course you did, Margie,” he says slowly, trying and likely failing to keep trepidation from his voice. He kisses her forehead. “I can’t believe you thought otherwise,” he says. College. Never in a million years would he ever think he’d be holding on to a college girl in his bed, but then he’s likely not going to be holding on to her for much longer with school starting in the fall. It doesn’t make his hands stop from sweeping up and down her bare back, though.

“My mom asked if I planned on living in the dorms or commuting,” she says, and her fingers, only moderately warmer than when she first tucked herself in, are a snowfall drift from his chest down his stomach, and Bronn sucks in a breath, from both the tingle of spring chill and aroused heat. “You know, how Loras does,” and her brother is the last thing he wants to talk about right now, with her hand moving up his hip and to the small of his back. She flexes her hand and pulls herself closer to him, as if she’s stitching herself to him with these feather-light touches.

“Okay,” he says, losing his breath and tilting his head back as she lifts hers to kiss his jaw.  While he’s used to this agony now, the way they’ve danced around each other, put hands and mouths to each other to let loose some of the tension, it’s still difficult to catch her words or her meaning, and they fall away from him like sand through his fingers; fingers busy now with the clasp of her bra before they move up to her shoulder.

“Loras lives with Renly now,” she says, and it's a vague memory, Renly and Loras, and it could be from ten years ago with the fog his mind is in now, thanks to her busy mouth, the tip of her hips into his, that warming hand on his back, the way she’s dragging her nails against his skin now.

“Okay,” he repeats, his forefinger dragging the bra strap down her arm, so he can catch the feel if not the sight of her bared breasts, wondering if this is a goodbye when he scoots down the mattress, half pulling the quilts with him, so that he can kiss and put his open mouth over each breast, touch his tongue to her, and now she’s the one gasping.

“I want to commute how Loras does,” she sighs, and now that he’s lower she can move her arm that was pinned between her body and the bed, and both her hands find their way into his hair. “I want to,  _oh,_ ” she says when he nips her the way he’s discovered she likes, covering the sting with a drag of his tongue.

“You want to live with Renly?” he says, pushing her onto her back, one knee, two knees to the mattress between her thighs as he rises up on his elbows above her. “You got a weird way of telling me, Margie,” he says, kissing between her breasts and up to her throat.

“No, dummy, I  _want,_ ” she starts, but then he kisses her mouth, lowers her hips to hers so he can feel the length of her chest and belly against him. “I want to be with  _you_ ,” and suddenly he gets it, and he stops, an open kiss frozen between their mouths, and then he draws his head back to look at her.

“You, wait, you want to live  _here_?”  _From mansion to shitty ranch house_ , he thinks, and he looks at her. Part of him thinks he should remind her that there’s one bathroom and crappy water pressure here, that it smells like horse in the front room all summer long, but then he’s never been one to tell Margie what to do, so he just grins when she nods eagerly, half her face painted in fuzzy, sundress moonlight.

“Why didn’t you just say so,” he says, moving his elbows from either side of her arms to the mattress just above her shoulders, his arms a protective arch around her head as he kisses her, because this isn’t a goodbye, her sneaking into his bedroom in the middle of the night, it’s a hello.

 

The steady-slow of his mouth and his hands has increased with an swell of enthusiasm, and in no time she’s in just a pair of panties beneath him, free enough without her jeans to wrap her legs around him, pulling him and holding him down to her, and he’s hard as a rock as he always is when they pull and tug on each other’s boundaries. It’s a rub of lace and the cotton of his boxers where their hips meet, a delicious, tantalizing agony, and he’s moaning against her skin and into her mouth nearly as loud as she is before he suddenly pulls back. His head is bowed and his chest heaves, and it’s several moments before he speaks.

“We gotta go a little slower or I’m going to lose my mind,” he says, sitting back on his heels between her thighs, taking the covers off of them with the movement as he rubs his face with his hand. Breezes blow in but they’re both overwarm now and she welcomes the night air that sifts across the fine hairs of her skin. Her legs are still hooked over his and she tightens her calves and hamstrings, tugging on him to come back to her, and he huffs a chuckle. “Fine, honey, you first,” and he lowers his hand to bring her around, but then she stills him with a palm to his knuckles, pinning him in place to the juncture of her thighs, and Margie shakes her head.

“Not like that, anymore,” she murmurs, and he stares up at her, and her eyes have adjusted well enough to see the surprise and scrutiny on his face. “I mean it, Bronny. I’m ready and I know you are, too,” she says, half a laugh gusting out because isn’t  _that_  the damn truth.

“Margie, you’re still—” but she cuts him off.

“Ten days, Bronn, I’m 18 in ten days. It’s pointless, waiting any longer just for ten stupid days,” and she can see him shudder, can see the resolve weakening like the shimmer of a mirage on the horizon.

“It’s illegal,” he murmurs, his fingers a wriggle between her hand and her underwear, his thumb dropping to that point on her body that makes her jump, where just a few slow, ginger-light swipes of his finger can make her come in a heartbeat.

“It’s love,” she corrects, and his shoulders slump and he sighs, his free hand sliding down her thigh as he stares between her legs, his fingertips a deep press into her belly just above the elastic of her panties, the hand on her hip gripping her so hard in makes her ache.

“I need to go find a condom,” he says, and now he’s shaking from anticipation and likely from the effect of years’ worth of stoicism falling to the wayside, petals off a rose, leaves off a tree.

“Don’t bother,” she says. “I’ve been on the pill since the day after my mom and dad busted us,” she says, laughing at the expression on his face. He grins with a shake of his head, whispering  _Clever, clever woman._ She lifts her hips in hopes he gets the hint, and she’s a luxurious smile when he does, hands curling around the sides of her underwear, and he pulls them up to her bent knees, kisses first one shin and then the other as she lifts her limbs so he can free her.

“Oh God,” he moans, sliding his hands from her crooked knees and down to her hips after he’s shed himself from his boxers, and they are naked together, head to toe, for the very first time, and she cannot help but drop her eyes and take him all in, and when she looks back up to his eyes they are dark and merry like a faun’s, and he’s grinning. “You trying to make me blush?”

“Maybe,” she says, and then they laugh together until it gets heavy and serious again, eyes a burn as he gazes at her, jaw muscles working. She watches as he scoots back until he’s kneeling on his floor, body folded over the foot of the bed, and he pulls her hips towards his mouth. It’s last Saturday all over again though this time without the rub of grass beneath her shoulders, with any shred of clothing between them. He’s gotten good at this and in no time she’s two fists in the sheets, left thigh draped over his rounded up shoulder, right foot planted to the mattress until that leg trembles so violently he cups his hand around the outside of her thigh and yanks it over his other shoulder, rendering himself completely enveloped in her. The pull of contact, the force of her pressed against his tongue and his mouth is enough, and he’s a grunt and a hum into her when she comes, her voice dried out from panting his name when she gasps and sighs, when she tries to say  _Bronn_  but it comes out a silent mewl.

He runs a trail of kisses up her body, far slower than he’s ever had to be, now that they’re safe and alone here in his room, no watchful parental eyes to dodge, no crowds at wash parties to hide from, no rapid breathing and fumbling touches in the fogged over cab of his truck. She smiles as he gets to his hands and knees, walking up her body until he drops to his elbows, hips nestled between her thighs. He kisses her with the salty sweet of his tongue and her orgasm, something she’s gotten used to in the past few weeks, something that sends an arc of want, a line of buzzing connection between her heart and the wetness he’s left in place of his tongue. His hand is in her hair, a slow sift, hesitant and cautious despite the thick press of his erection against her belly.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispers. “I don’t- I want you to feel good, honey,”

“You won’t,” she vows, “and I will,” and he nods, murmurs  _Okay,_  and they’re two streams of sighs, a whine from her and groan from him as he moves his hips, short staccato movements, and she realizes he’s  _scared,_ too scared to draw back and push into her _._  “Bronny, it’s okay,” she whispers as he drops his head to her shoulder with an  _I know, I know, but goddammit_ , and she understands now, all this waiting, all this agony, and now that it’s here, he doesn’t want to ruin it. Margie lifts her hand, a thumb beneath his jaw, and tilts his head so she can kiss him, and she draws him out, draws him in, and he’s hot tongue, the lightest scrub of scruff against her chin when she reaches down between them, and once she guides him towards her he sighs  _Margaery_  and pushes inside her.

There is a tug and a stretch and a sting, the way sunlight strikes your eyes when they’ve opened after a long, long sleep, and that’s what it feels like when he starts to move inside her. Aside from that rich, thick  _full_  feeling it’s like opening her eyes, opening  _everything_  for the first time in her life. She’s grateful for the orgasm he gave her, for the ease it lends to the both of them as he moves, drawing out and in, a slow pull and push. Soon the new and foreign fullness stops feeling uncomfortable so much as it starts feeling breath-hitching and nudging, because something is being reached for the very first time inside her, a stoke and drag, a stroke and a swell.

She winds her arms around him as he kisses her, dropping them feverishly to her mouth and her jaw, her throat where he pants out  _Yes_ and  _Fuck_  and  _Margie,_  where  _I love you_  curls like a spiral of sweetness against the shell of her ear. His hips drive forward with far more strength now, and her eyes close as he grunts, his exhale a stammer of breath through gritted teeth that matches his thrusts.

“Oh God, Margie, I can’t, I can’t, Jesus,” he grits out, rising up as far as he can with his elbows to the mattress, eyes hot and wild when he looks down at her, and he’s  _perfect_  like this, despite the soreness she’s already feeling, because he is  _inside_ her right now, they are as close as they can be, and it’s all she’s ever wanted.

“Bronn,” she breathes. “I love you too, I love you so much _,_ ” she says until he cries out, something windswept and rough from the back of his throat. In the next moment he’s gone, pulling out of her much to her now bereft sorrow, and there is hot wet between their stomachs as she whimpers for the loss of him as much as for the sweet newness of everything. But she’s his now as much as he’s hers, so when he collapses on top her, back heaving, skin warm and slick from sweat, still ensnared in her arms, she smiles, eyes closed though they’re finally  _open_  now.

 

“And you’re sure you’re okay?” he asks for the third time. The first was just afterwards, when he still saw stars on the inside of his eyelids, when he still felt the heat of her on his cock, when he still felt swept away by his Margie. The second was after he cleaned them up, a damp washcloth acquired after a chilly, naked sprint to the bathroom, her skin a riot of gooseflesh as he swept the cloth across the flat plane of her belly, his free hand soon to follow. And now the third, here with her pressed to his side, the two of them burrowed under quilts, the alarm clock set for 5am so she can make it back to Alysanne’s in time, so he can wake up as if nothing ever happened even though  _everything_ has happened. She laughs, throaty and low at him, her head on his chest, and she presses a kiss to his skin when she tips her face into him, hums as she exhales.

“More than okay, I promise,” she says, wonderfully naked against him, her legs a tangle in his, and he kisses her when she looks up at him. “Are  _you_  okay? I thought you were going to rocket to the moon for a minute there,” she says, and he is too-loud laughter considering how late it is, how Sandor sleeps down two short hallways in the living room, and she shuts him up with hand over his mouth.

“I thought I _did_ , for a minute there,” he muffles against her palm, and now she’s all giggles, and he laughs with her as they hunker further under the bedclothes, a giddy cocoon of disbelieving delight, of something that he can only describe as  _sumptuous_ , though he doesn’t think he’s ever used that word in his life. But then, he’s never known it before. There’s a time for everything. This is the time for  _sumptuous._  “So you want to move in here, huh,” he says, twisting towards her so they face each other on their sides, only their eyes above the covers, and he sees the moonlight fleck and flit in her eyes when she nods.

“I don’t want to be anywhere else, Bronny,” she murmurs, voice a faraway tumble, the thunder of church mice. “I don’t want to like, force myself in here or anything, but,” she starts, and he cuts her off with a kiss, shakes his head, cups her jaw under the edge of the counterpane.

“There’s no such thing, not when the door’s been open this whole time,” he says. “I’ve been in love with you too long to just let you waltz into Tucson for four years. I’ve done my time, woman, so hell yes I want you here. All to myself,” he says, kissing her, letting her snare him again, all over again as she wraps her arms around the back of his neck, pulling him up and halfway on top of her. “Welcome home, honey,” he murmurs against her mouth as she laughs into his. He cannot stop kissing her, cannot get over this sweet slide of her skin against his, this new closeness, and when the alarm blares to life with Garth Brooks, when Sandor shuffles by with a sharp knock this time instead of opening the door and turning on the light, he doesn’t care that they haven’t even slept.

Because it’s hello, it’s home, and as far as he’s concerned, it’s forever.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/108055589973/one-fine-summer-chapter-9-feels)

May, 2005

He’s fed and watered the horses, has turned them out in the only fenced in portion of his property to enjoy the day, and has even driven down to the nursery to meet a panicked Alysanne, desperate to replace her mother’s beloved planter of succulents that she killed while housesitting. Bronn did a damned good job of digging out the poor dead plants and replacing them with near identical ones, rosettes and strange, spikes and one particularly prickly little bastard. The house was still a sleep-soaked world when he came home 20 minutes ago, so Bronn’s drinking another cup of coffee outside when Sandor pulls up.

“Is she seriously still asleep?” Sandor asks as he slams shut his truck door, and Bronn nods from his perch on the pony wall that encloses the front yard, separating the white and mint green grasses from the dusty gravel of the driveway. She’s already filled this space with roses, a smaller sprawl than the garden they planted together at Highgarden eight years ago, and he has spent this brief respite letting the waft of their perfume drift him over.

“In her defense, she’s got no reason to get up at dawn. It’s only 9am,” he says, a squint to the morning sky to confirm this, and Sandor shrugs, a shirtless and sweaty mess even this early, but then he’s never been one to avoid hands-on labor, and ever since they struck ground on his property he’s been either there or at the nursery, in the greenhouse or at Home Depot.

“If it’s only 9am, then it’s already hotter than hell,” Sandor says, walking around the truck to lean against the passenger door, more or less facing him as he rehydrates with a gallon jug of water. “Gonna be a nasty summer if it’s already this hot.” It’s a balmy bloom of a day to Bronn, no warmer than usual, but then again he’s not building houses with his mind’s eye, not imagining installing roofing tiles in the heat of the afternoon, spreading a gravel drive in June or insulating walls with the threat of a monsoon on his back.

“I don’t know, man, it’s shaping up to be one fine summer if you ask me. Margie graduating, your house getting built, the nursery finally pulling in enough to cover the bills,” and Sandor shrugs, the recent tree tattoo on the side of his ribs stretching with the movement, the slight lift of naked boughs, the twist of a trunk. It reminds Bronn of him clutching saplings to his chest in the midst of thunder and lightning and he ducks his head, sips the dregs of his coffee to hide a grin. As gruff and mean as the son of a bitch can be, he’s sentimental, and that reminds him.

“You know Margie wants you there today,” Bronn says lightly, another squint at the sun, a glance down the driveway as if he expects company and is not simply giving his friend time to reconsider, to not be such a jackass whenever it comes to his girlfriend. Sandor sighs, and Bronn swivels his gaze back in his direction.

“Tell her I said congratulations again, or whatever, but I’m busy. I have stuff to do, and they just laid the foundation,” he starts, but Bronn shuts him up, interrupts with the clearing of his throat.

“You like that land of yours, don’t you,” he says, jumping down off the wall with his bare feet, swinging his coffee cup face down in a sweep, letting the rest of his coffee fly to the dirt and rock at his feet.

“I fuckin’ love that land, you know that,” Sandor says, glaring at him as he swigs again from the gallon of spring water, lowering the thing and resting the base of the jug on his thigh. Bronn looks at him a hard moment before finally nodding.

“Well, then. I think you should come up with us today,” he says slowly, and Sandor stills, only his throat muscles moving as he swallows his mouthful of water and stares at him. Bronn remembers that photograph Margie took of him all that time ago, a solitary slash of shadow and silhouette; he doesn’t want to be hard on him, but Margie’s done more for him than he knows, and he promised his old man that he’d not let Sandor slip to the wayside, and so here they are. Finally his friend wipes his mouth with a forearm before sighing. He swore never to tell him, but Bronn never swore _not_ to drop a hint or two _,_  and so he is guiltless when he watches Sandor nod.

“All right then, I’ll go. But you better wake her up now. I’m not driving all the way to Tucson if your girlfriend is going to be passed out in bed,” and Bronn grins because that’s as big a compliment as Margie can get where her friendship with Sandor is concerned.

Their bedroom is a haze of morning light through gauzy feminine curtains, a lacy white that makes patterns of sunshine and shadow on the walls. This room is a far cry from what it once was, with throw pillows and roses and photographs everywhere now, with flip flops and high heels in the closet they share, with spidery thin necklaces a scatter on the dresser, the glint and shimmer of a pair of earrings on the nightstand. A floral sundress used to hang amidst all that lace before a summer storm sucked it out and blew it away; he would have been devastated if he didn’t have the flesh and blood woman in their bed every night, if his hands weren’t full of the feel of her, the silk of her hair and the heat of her suntanned skin. He doesn’t have to cling to the shadow of her, anymore, another way this room has changed for the better.

 He’s a slow, silent pad across the room towards her, setting his empty coffee cup beside the alarm clock (that hasn’t been set for 5am in four years) before squatting down beside the bed.

“Margie, wake up,” he says, face inches from hers, and he’d think the aroma of coffee coming off of him would be enough but she merely mumbles in her sleep and turns away from him. He calls her name again, a little louder this time, but she  _Hmmphs_  with a little more vehemence, flings an arm out of the covers to drape across her eyes and hide behind.

“Dammit woman, get your fine ass out of bed,” he says, standing and planting his foot on the mattress edge, posting up on the bed, a six foot loom above her in bare feet and a pair of jeans. He knows what’s under those covers, a pair of panties and his old shirt, golden skin and pretty legs, and he doesn’t know whether to fuck with her or fuck her. His feet are on either side of her hips, and he bounces, once, testing the air and her sense of humor, though he’s already grinning regardless of whatever she’s going to give him. There is no reaction, so in mere seconds he’s gone from one tentative bounce to the leaping and cavorting of a billy goat, knees bent in the air as he jumps up and down, up and down, shouting  _MARGIE’S GONNA GRADUATE, MARGIE’S GONNA GRADUATE_ until there is a loud kitty-cat-howl of sleepy indignation from the pillow, and he stops to grin down at her, arms folded across his chest. She’s a glory, even grumpy and half awake. She’s the cream in his coffee, a slice of lemon in a glass of iced tea, the drag of fingernails down his spine when he makes her come. Right now she’s a sentence of execution, though she’s as sleep-wrinkled as that beat up old shirt of his she wears to bed most nights.

“I’m, going, to kill, you,” she grits out, his resumed bouncing lending punctuation to her declaration. She flips from her side onto her back, sweeping the blonde from her eyes to glare up at him. “You, little,  _shithead_ ,” and with a quickness he should really anticipate at this point in their life together, she reaches up and hooks him behind the bend of a leg, yanking hard enough to bring him to his knees, and now she’s a slumber-thick laugh of triumph.

“There she is! All bright eyed and bushy tailed,” Bronn says, on his hands and knees above her, dipping his head to kiss her before pushing his hands off of the mattress, crawling on his knees up towards her shoulders. “Now get up, or I’m going to put my dick on your face,” and he laughs when she just rolls her eyes; he has threatened her with this ever since the day she moved in and it no longer shocks and appalls, though it is no less funny to him for the lack of reaction on her part.

“Do it and I’ll bite it off,” she sighs, closing her eyes again, and then they both laugh when Sandor walks by the open bedroom door and says  _I will pay good money if you do._

The graduation ceremony is a long and boring one, but he’s sucked down enough coffee to deal without yawning, and he and Sandor whittle away the time discussing the building of houses and the growth of plants. While Alerie is a stern glare their way, in less than twenty minutes both Willas and Mace have entered the conversation; they are a four man huddle of distraction as whatshisname gives a motivating speech that has little to do with either of their lines of work. But eventually the College of Fine Arts stands and she’s a beaming wave and hop to him and her family, and he waves his baseball hat like he’s trying to attract a swarm of bees, and then it’s over. There are photos of Margie with her purple and white lei and her beaming smile beneath her mortarboard. There are photos of her surrounded by parents and then by brothers. There are photos with Bronn and upon her insistence, one with Sandor as well, Margie a tiny thing between two sets of broad shoulders, a pretty little lady flanked by a couple of rednecks. It reminds him of the photo of his dad with Sandor and him and makes him smile even an hour later as they have lunch downtown at the Cup Café. 

Mimosas are a scatter across the table amidst dishes of salads Bronn wouldn’t dare taste let alone pronounce, and he and Sandor tear into identical versions of the one burger on the menu while Margie pops slivers of quiche into her mouth. It’s a sun-dappled chatter and buzz of happy conversation, though he nearly chokes on his angus when Olenna asks Margie if she’s honestly going to shape her life around a landscaper.  _Does this biddy know I’m sitting right fucking here?_ He chews his food, staring at his plate like it’s a picture of Margie’s ass, wondering where the hell he’s supposed to look, now.

“You could travel the world with that photography degree, and you’re going to park yourself in Sonoita. Tumbleweeds move more than you will.”

“I take plenty of pretty pictures where I live, and you’ve been to the gallery shows to see it for yourself. Besides,  _you_  shaped  _your_  life around a farmer, granny; a landscaper is not so far off the mark,” Margie says breezily, not bothering to hide the defensive bite, and he’s got the press of her hand to his leg under the table for comfort. He doesn’t give a shit, not  _really_ , because he has always, always known who he is, but the idea that the man he is could be what’s holding her back,  _that_  rankles, and he sniffs uncouthly before lifting his eyes to the old bat.

“Yes, but he was a well off farmer,” Olenna says, her shrewd eyes settling on Bronn. He swallows his mouthful of food and chases it with half a glass of champagne and orange juice, ignores the growl-rough mutter of Sandor and looks back without motive. _This is it, sweetheart, take it in if you can._

“If you want  _well off_  then put your bet on Loras,” she says with a grin to her brother who sits with Renly across the table. “They’ll get married and  _he_  can be the rich one.” Margie kisses Bronn’s cheek, squeezes his knee beneath the drape of tablecloth before letting her hand slide up until the edge of her palm is a brush against his balls. “I’ll be the happy one,” she says with a luxurious sigh, and Bronn looks up and grins at Olenna, flicking up his eyebrows. She huffs a laugh of halfhearted amusement, rolls her eyes before shifting her gaze to her other grandchild, frank in her appraisal of the situation. Renly’s richer than sin these days, having successfully merged Storm’s End vineyards with Sunspear Winery, and he doesn’t blame the man for looking like a cat with cream.

He’d be jealous if he cared, but he’s got his business and he’s working on getting his father’s land, Margie’s hand on his cock at the moment, her hand over his heart when they fall asleep at night. Olenna can suck it.

“Hey, I’ll be the rich  _and_  happy one, sister,” Loras says, nudging Renly with his shoulder, and it impresses Bronn, how the talk of marriage is such an easy one to these two. He’s gun shy thanks to a runaway mother and a heartbroken father, but these two lovebirds sit there grinning like fools, as if it’s as easy as popping down to the grocery store, an errand between the post office and the gas station. Olenna’s got a thoughtful look on her face, but then Mace makes a strangled sort of cough that he tries to cover up with a swallow of ice water.

“Can we just move past the topic of my son getting married,” he says, beet red now, mopping his mouth and face with his napkin. There is half of a sentence Mace is leaving off, one that everyone is aware of, and Margie glances at Bronn with a small frown because this is a time to celebrate her achievements, not discuss discomfort over his son being gay. It’s a quiet moment, and even Loras and Renly, normally as full of lighthearted and bawdy humor as he himself is, are silent, sharing a glance and a barely perceptible roll of their eyes. But then the old hawk comes to the rescue.

“Oh please, Mace, for pity’s sake, like you’re one to talk,” Olenna says as she uses her knife to deftly fold an overlarge piece of lettuce onto the tines of her fork, pausing to capture a piece of tuna on top of it. Before eating it she aims the mouthful of food at everyone in a sweeping circle, snaring everyone’s attention before she jabs the fork in her son’s direction at the head of the table. “You used to love wearing dresses when you were a boy, and you stole so many pairs of my pumps I had to buy you a pair of your own.”

Bronn doesn’t think he has ever laughed so hard in his life.

 

February, 2008

 It has snowed for three nights now, the longest snowstorm he can remember, and while he’s not a cheapskate it still feels like a waste, turning on the heat when it’s just him in this big house.  _Not big,_  Sandor corrects as he dresses quickly after his piping hot shower, and steam still rises off his skin, still drifts like smoke from his open bathroom door into the chill of his bedroom.  _It’s only three bedrooms and two baths, a perfectly normal size,_  but it’s large enough to be this cold and cavernous, and then there are the questions of the contractors that haunt him even four years later.

 _And it’s just you then? No missus or kids?_ Sandor barked at him to take a look at his face and ask that fucking question one more time, and after that they all worked the summer and fall with an understanding. They weren’t there to chitchat like a bunch of old women, they were there to work.

Four years already, and he and this house have gotten to know each other. He’s tweaked the electric and had his hands in the mess of the plumbing problem two years ago, knows her inside and out, is the captain and sole passenger on this still and silent ship. He walks the halls at night in the dark without so much as a drift of fingertips against the wall to mark his passage, but he does it enough anyways, a way to say hello or thank you, like patting a horse on the neck after a good trail ride.

Four years already, and he’s just now gained the courage to put a fire in the fireplace for the very first time, or at least to seriously consider it. He’s had half a cord of wood on the back porch this entire winter, having convinced himself in December to finally stop being such a pussy and to just go for it, but here he is, two and a half months later, staring with his arms across his chest at the circular, black metal fireplace in the center of his house. He has eaten dinner, has showered and changed, but aside from just completely backing down and giving up, there is nothing left to do, nothing left with which to delay it.

“Come on, you coward,” he mutters, flicking on the back porch light and sliding open the glass door. There is a gust of frigid air, a swirl of flurries that forces its way in, the push of an unwanted houseguest, and he makes short work of piling a dozen small, split logs in his arms before striding back inside, shutting the door after dumping the wood on an old horse blanket covering the floor in front of the metal hearth.

Ten minutes and twice as many swear words later, he’s squatting in front of a healthy blaze, the curved screen safely slid shut and locked into place. He’s prouder than he carea to admit; he’ll help Bronn pile wood up in an outdoor fire ring all day long, will gladly do all the labor that leads up to the moment where the wood pile is hosed down with lighter fluid – joy boy juice, Bronn calls it – but this is really the first time he’s ever lit a fire. He’s a grown man of 30 but here he is, staring at this fire as if it’s the finest thing he’s done, as if he’s cured AIDs or won the Nobel Peace Prize.

He watches television in a dark house that is lit only by the flicker from the screen and the dance of firelight on the red concrete floor, only making the  _occasional_ glance of apprehension to the fireplace before the flames die down and he’s comfortable enough to leave it unattended. It’s warm here now with that bed of dying coals he can see from the hallway when he makes his way to his room in the dark. Sandor thinks it’s likely that final glance behind him that does it, that final vision of red-warm-glow that steals into his dreams, warm dreams with frost on the edges, a world of winter at night and a woman with hair so red it looks like flames, and he reaches out to touch it, closes his fist around it before his eyes open to a world of white outside his window.

It is the first time Sandor dreams of fire and does not wake in a cold sweat with a hammering heart.

 

December 2012

“I’m surrounded by Tyrells,” Renly says dryly, chewing on a toothpick as they wait their turn in the Municipal Court of Seattle, and it’s that sign alone, the nervous oral fixation that marks him as an ex-smoker, that lets Margie know he’s antsier than he lets on. But it is sort of funny, how there are only two people here whose last names are different. It’s a tight knot of Tyrell loyalty, Olenna and Willas, Mace and Alerie, Margie and Bronn, and of course Renly and Loras, the two grooms and the men of the hour.

They are here in Washington one week after they started handing out same sex marriage licenses; Loras told her their bags were packed since the referendum a month ago, they’ve been that excited. Margie herself is a giddy, happy beam of energy despite the red eye flight they took to meet them up here.

“You’re preaching to the choir, buddy,” Bronn says with a yawn, and she pins him with a gentle smile because she knows he’s exhausted.

They had to wait until last minute to leave to ensure everything was in place to care for their little homestead, which is why they left Sonoita for the Tucson airport at 3am earlier that morning. It’s hard traveling out of state with a barn full of horses, Nugget and Penny, her own paint horse Briar and that mean old horse Stranger, but Brienne took them in up at Sapphire Stables so long as it was just two nights, full as her plate is. The dogs are with Jaime Lannister, and she taps out a message on her phone just now to see if they’re okay, to ask him to drive up and check on old Penny.  _I accidentally packed Penny’s horsey aspirin with the dog stuff. Just tell Brienne you’re good with horses, she probably thinks you’re not good for much, pretty boy. :P_  and if anything will get him over there flirting, it’s the idea that a woman doesn’t think he’s good enough.

“What’re you doing on that phone of yours, huh,” Bronn says, resting his weary head on her shoulder, slipping his arms around her waist. She wears him like a lifelong hug, comfortable and warm, doesn’t mind that he’s reading her personal business because he kisses her throat so deliciously, a tip of his face and a press of his mouth to her skin. She  _Mmms_  to him as she replies to Jaime’s little quip about being more a horseman with one hand than Brienne can be even with all six feet, three inches of her, telling him he’s just a chicken shit.

“Matchmaking while you’re at a wedding? Are you ever going to give it a rest, you’ve already plunked these two dudes at the altar, you got me in your claws, what more do you want?” She tilts her face towards hers, resting her head back against his shoulder so she can whisper something nasty in his ear, and his fingers dig into her ribs at the racy suggestions.

“You think  _you_  got us together?” Renly asks just before Loras plucks the toothpick from his mouth and pockets it, and he grins, taking Loras by the hand when they are waved forward. Margie squirms out of Bronn’s borderline obscene grip on her hips as they move forward en masse. She thinks of standing in the rain the afternoon she was going to snare Renly and deliver him like a prize to her brother, of Bronn picking her up and how lost she got in him that afternoon all those years ago.

“Well, I tried,” she smiles, and Bronn gives  them a quick rundown of her scheme as the judge readies himself and the entire family is a burst of laughter as Renly and Loras take their places. There is the breathtaking sprawl of the city beyond the stories-up windows before which Loras, Renly and Judge Luwin stand, and despite the cloud cover that softens the height and the distance and the enormity of it all, she clings to Bronn’s suitcoat sleeve.

“I feel like I could tip right over the edge,” he murmurs though they are a couple dozen feet away, knowing what grips her. She traveled briefly during her college education, to Manhattan and Chicago, once to Boston a couple of years ago to show her work to a collector, but it is still heart-racing, these heights. But then he reminds her that aside from their early morning plane ride this is the highest up he’s ever been. “You sure you don’t want to leave me for a big city like this, honey?” Bronn whispers as he kisses the lobe of her ear, nips at the pearl earring there, and she shivers.

“You’re an idiot,” she whispers back, and he chuckles, his hand a sweep down her spine, one she can feel through her fitted wool coat over her dress.

“So you keep telling me,” and his hand drifts across the small of her back to splay and twine her fingers with his, to squeeze her hand with the rough, dry callouses she has memorized over the years. He’s her anchor here where it feels like they’re miles above the ground, and she watches her brother marry the love of his life while the love of hers sweeps his thumb up and down her knuckle.

Theirs are words of love and adoration, faith and fortitude, and she’s got tears in her eyes when she and Willas hand over the wedding bands, identical shiny, soot-grey tungsten, grey as the sky beyond, though she knows Renly’s has LT engraved on the inside, Loras’s RB. Theirs is a kiss between two men who have waited to be recognized as worthy, and the moment is a powerful one for all present, but none so much as their father. When the kiss breaks they are two foreheads pressed together, Renly’s face cupped in her brother’s hands, something precious and wondrous for him to cherish his whole life, Renly’s hand resting on Loras’s shoulder, his wedding band a glint even in the winter light of midafternoon. Mace lets loose a cracked sob, a hand cupped over his eyes before Alerie runs a tissue along the edge of his palm, and he nods, taking it and swabbing his closed eyes before blinking and walking forward.

“Come here, sons. No, I mean both of _you_ ,” he says gruffly when Renly takes a step back, assuming he meant Willas in his stead, and Mace drags the newlyweds against his barrel chest with two sweeps of his arms. Loras and Renly exchange a glance over the breadth of Mace’s wide shoulders but it’s a reciprocated hug, and it lasts until they all leave the room, Loras and his husband hand in hand.

“I was waiting for that,” her mother murmurs, giving Margie a sliding glance and smile as they take the elevator down. Willas pats his father awkwardly on the back with one hand as he clutches his cane in the other. Bronn rests his head against the mirrored wall with his eyes closed, Olenna chats vineyard output with Renly, who is in one ear and out the other as he smiles at Loras. Margie thinks her heart is going to swell and burst like a balloon, but then her mother makes her snort a laugh when she whispers “It’s about time he got his head out of his ass.”

They dart outside, down the stairs to the sidewalk, and they are half a dozen snaps of opened umbrellas and when she turns he’s there, black umbrella waiting and held aloft to keep her dry, and she tucks herself in against him. Bronn looks almost, _almost_ like he fits in here with his suit and tie, cuff links her father gave him as an early Christmas present, but beneath the legs of his slacks is a pair of black leather cowboy boots, toes slightly upturned to keep out of dirt and horseshit though today it’s to keep out of the rain. Margie burrows closer under his arm, and he holds her firmly to his side.

“You did it, bud,” Willas says, reaching from one island of umbrella to the other, clapping Loras on the back, and they embrace, brother to brother. Margie hopes against hope her eldest sibling finds love, and she stands there running a mental inventory of Sonoita’s singles, is busy with it as they all chatter about restaurants, about heading to the hotel to change and dry off, Bronn mentioning a much needed nap before going out on the town that night.

“Well, we had to wait to get married because of the law, so I wonder what’s keeping Bronn from getting off the dime, huh?” Renly asks brightly as he takes his husband by the hand, and they all look over to where she and Bronn stand in a jet-lagged huddle. She looks up, blinking several times as she comes back to the present and the now, and she doesn’t know whether to give them all a dirty look for putting him on the spot or to ask him the same thing.

“Maybe he’s gay, too,” Willas says in a stage whisper amidst a ripple of chuckles, and while there is the briefest wave of confliction on Bronn’s features, soon enough that ages old wily grin slides into place on his face as he dusts off his lapel.

“You wish, Big Willy,” Bronn says, and even Olenna laughs, though before the first cab slides up at her dad’s beckon, she lets Bronn know Willas would be the better catch.

Though Bronn is absolutely wiped out he insists the others catch the cabs back to the Sheraton, and for a few minutes they have the wet, gray sidewalk to themselves, and she listens to the hubbub and commotion of city life, here with her country bumpkin. Margie is well aware, and not for the first time, how ardently happy she is with her life. _So what if Loras is the rich_ and _happy one,_ she thinks, eyes closing as he kisses her hairline, as if he’s kissing her thoughts with gratitude. _He still doesn’t have a Bronny, not like I do._

“You think I’ve taken too long to get off the dime, honey?” It’s a whisper against the baby hairs of her temple, the warmth of his breath a direct contrast to the chilly gusts of humid winter air all around them.

She thinks about it, how long it took them to get together in the beginning, how it’s been one sleepover after another, a slumber party that’s lasted over a decade. She thinks of surprising him in the shower and how he screams like a woman when she touches him with cold hands, of how he almost set the kitchen on fire a few Thanksgivings ago, how he broke his leg falling off of Nugget and how babying him was some of the most fun she ever had. How he presses her against a wall of their little house, telling her how it’s impossible, having her here in his world, that he needs to touch her to make sure it’s not a dream. He moves inside her and he says her name, calls her a little witch and a devil, calls her his kitten and angel, kisses her like she’s the last river on earth and he’s dying of thirst. He’s loved her since she was fifteen. She’s been his since she laid eyes on him, since she knocked him down on his ass with a single shove.

The answer is easy.

“You take all the time you need, Bronny,” she says, lifting her head to look up at him. “I’m not going anywhere. Besides, you know what they say,” she says, a breath in her lungs ready to finish her sentence, but then he’s got his hand at the back of her neck, pins her in place as he kisses her, hungry and eager despite his fatigue and the cold, a slide of tongue and press of lips. She realizes it’s reassurance that she’s given him, the one thing he seems to need from time to time, and it is relief, confidence restored with which he kisses her now.

“Good things take time,” he murmurs against her mouth, as if he stole the words away from her with his kiss, and she sighs happily, nodding.

“If that’s the case then our relationship is the best thing there is,” she says with a breathless laugh and he kisses her again, arms wrapped around her so the umbrella is held sideways at her shoulder, useless and forgotten as they kiss in the persistent drizzle and oncoming fog, here on this hard sea of wet pavement in an unknown world.

“You’re damn right it is,” he says, and with a truth like that, there’s no need for flowers or a ring.

Not today.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/108277389148/one-fine-summer-chapter-10-feels)

November 2013

 

“She’s driving me fuckin’ crazy,” Bronn says cheerfully, happy to complain about the woman he loves, because it makes him sound less like a sap and he still gets to talk about her. He’s got an armload of noble fir that’s scratching his cheek as he and Sandor heft a Christmas tree over the side of Barristan’s truck. The crazy bastard’s ordered three of them, which all but confirms Olenna’s suspicions that his main house must be huge, and he takes a minute to brush the needles off his fleece jacket. It’s only November and they’ve already had a rainstorm that was more ice than water, and he blows a mouthful of hot breath on his hands, wishing he hadn’t forgotten his gloves.

“What’s she doing now, cooking you apple pies after giving you blow jobs?” Sandor says, making Barristan choke on his thermos of coffee, and Bronn laughs. He should know better, talking about Margie so much around him, considering it’s been a year since he last got laid and the silly bitch nearly screeched at the sight of him the next day. But it’s hard not to when she’s his world, when she’s roses in the front yard and roses in the back, when she cooks him breakfast and makes him lunch, when she combs her fingers through his hair at night while they watch television. And then  _after_  television, when she’s on him like a cheap suit. Bronn sighs.

“Worse. She keeps trying to give me money and it’s pissing me off,” he says. “It was my old man’s mortgage and now it’s mine. Blackwater money’s gonna buy that sonuvabitch property, not Tyrell. Like I’d let that biddy Olenna give me smug eyes, knowing she helped me buy my own land,” and Barristan snorts.

“That old harpy,” he says with a grunt as he slides his silver and turquoise money clip off a wad of cash, licking his thumb before dealing out $200. “I reckon she’s got claws a foot long,” and he laughs when Sandor warns him against the horror of seeing her toenails.

“Talk about talons, Selmy,” he says as the old man slaps the money in Sandor’s palm. “You take it easy.”

“You boys have a good Christmas now,” he says, and Bronn and Sandor grunt in unison by way of reply, and they turn as one to Alyce’s silver haired parents who are waiting beside their station wagon for their tree. The sky is the color of gravel and looks damn near as heavy, with knotted up clouds of cotton and wool, white and grey, black in some spots, and the pale grasses and black asphalt look all the more severe for it. It’s enough to make him want to hustle through this line of folks waiting for their trees, to get home before it gets any colder.

“Try not to talk about blow jobs around Mrs. Graceford,” Bronn mutters as they walk across the dirt parking lot to where they stand in their Pendleton jackets, hands shoved in their pockets for protection against the bone dry and brittle wind.

“Considering how long it’s been since I got one, I’ll talk about them all I –” Sandor stops as his phone jangles to life in the pocket of his levis, and Bronn pauses, turning to see just in time as Sandor answers the phone, his face an unreadable line of severity.

“We’ve got business, man, what the hell,” Bronn hisses, but Sandor waves him away before pressing his index finger against his bearded mouth, turns and walks away without a word, and Bronn is left to wrangle and haul a seven foot tree on top of Graceford’s stupid station wagon by himself. The whip crack of wind steals away the obscenities he mutters as he stands on top of the car and pulls the tree up by its stump, Mr. Graceford a bumbling, polite nuisance as he tries in vain to help.

“What the fuck was that about?” Bronn says as the Gracefords drive off, as they pull a Douglas fir from the stack of purchased trees and heft it on their right shoulders to toss into the bed of another truck. Sandor shakes his head, at once closed off and shut down, impenetrable as an army tank. Bronn sighs and rolls his eyes, accepts it as he so often does.

They work in silence the rest of the afternoon, selling Christmas trees and mustard weed for winter ground cover, old sheets they buy at swap meets in Tucson so the locals here have extras to protect their gardens from overnight frost. He is a constant glance Sandor’s way but there is nothing to see there, just a blank expression that reminds him of garage doors closing down and locking. It is not until Sandor disappears into the nursery while Bronn collects cash from the last customer, it is not until he hears  _Are they gone_  that he knows something is seriously, seriously wrong.

The last time he heard Sandor’s voice break was when Jonn died.

“What the hell is going on?” he says as he storms into the nursery, heart beating faster than he’d like because he’s already lost someone to disease. Sandor “You go to the doctor and get bad news or something, what? You know better than to hide that shit from me, you cocksucker,” he starts, but then Sandor turns and ends him with a solitary burn of a look.

“Gregor had a kid,” he says, and Bronn’s jaw drops, because  _What?_  His brother is someone they  _never_  talk about, not since he called in the middle of the night a year ago to tell him he died in combat. Bronn’s got his hands on his hips like a fishwife, is staring slack jawed at his friend as he struggles to come to terms with what Sandor just said.

“Okay,” he says slowly, vowels drawn like cast out fishing wire, dropping his hands to hang useless at his sides, and he stupidly looks left and right as if trying to find answers amongst the plants. “So?”

“So he’s dead, and so is this kid’s mother apparently,” Sandor says, voice flat, words heavy and dull, water-smoothed river rocks falling from his mouth. He glances behind him, pulls over a five gallon bucket and upends it, sitting on it with his head in his hands, fingers digging through his hair to his scalp.

“Okay,” Bronn says again, shaking his head. He leans against a hip-height shelf of cold weather shrubs, folding his arms across his chest, and he is mystified, assumes the seriousness with which Sandor is telling him this strange and cryptic news has to do with it simply revolving around Gregor, but then he is floored by Sandor’s next statement.

“Next of kin, Bronn. I’m the only surviving next of kin. I- she- there’s a will. I have to go to Tulsa. I didn’t- I never knew about her.”

“Her, who’s her?” he says, wishing Margie were here because she would know what to do, and all he seems to be able to do is say  _Okay_  and ask idiotic questions, because Sandor lifts his head to glare at him, to roll his eyes with a heavy, world-weighted sigh.

“The kid. Her name’s Genna, and I have to go get her and bring her home. She’s- I’m all she’s got, they say. I don’t have a choice.”

“You’ve always got a choice,” he says without thinking, and where he thinks Sandor is going to fly off the handle and maybe sock him, he simply nods, heaving himself to his feet, a giant in a house full of plants. He rubs his face with his hands before looking up to the ceiling.

“I know I do,” he says to the sky. That’s why I have to go to Tulsa.”

 

December, 2013

 

The past few weeks have gone by and Sandor cannot say exactly how he moved through them, only that it felt like fog, dense and thick and discombobulating, like someone was pushing him through it, a hand between his shoulder blades. DNA tests and wills and airplanes, CPS and a judge, counselors and doctors and teachers and hotels have all led him here, sitting on an uncomfortable couch that is too small for his large frame, making him feel even more out of place.

“Now don’t be alarmed if she cries or is upset, you know, with the um, you know,” Gayle says with a limp-wristed circle of her finger to her cheek as she opens the door to the family therapy room. He snorts and rolls his eyes, and she has the good grace to look sheepish. She is a middle aged woman, looks as rumpled as her pantsuit, tired and worn thin, but she sighs and shakes her short hair out of her eyes, gives him as cheerful as a smile as she can. “So, are you ready to meet her?”

Sandor stares at the little stuffed toy dog in his hands, turns it over and over in his hands wondering if toys can feel dizzy, wondering if he’d fall over himself if he stood up right now. He does not say any of this, instead nods his head as he lifts his eyes.

“Yeah, bring her in,” he says, and she nods, poking her head out the door and waving in a gesture signaling approach. His heart pounds and his mouth runs dry; he half wishes Margie and Bronn had come with him, but he was all bark and half bite back at the hotel, insisting he do this alone. They’ve been unwavering pillars of support these past few weeks, helping him with the adoption paperwork, swearing they’ll go with him to the hearing in three days, and all he’s done is snap at them.  _Even the goddamn toy was Margie’s doing._

Gayle steps aside as another CPS worker leads in a little girl by the hand, and just like that he is face to face with Gregor’s offspring, a slip of a girl with eyes like saucers, a tumble of hair so dark it could be his own, and that is when it strikes him, that she is his family, the only scrap of it left to walk the earth. She’s a trembling chin and the very clear evidence of recently shed tears; there are the faintest tracks down her face where they dried, the signs of mourning and grief painted onto her skin. He knows those feelings well.

“This is your Uncle Sandor, Genna,” Gayle says kindly, the wrinkle of a woman immediately turning on the honeyed voice of patience, maternal and kind, soft and sweet, everything his voice isn’t, everything  _he_  isn’t. Sandor feels doomed. “You want to go say hi?”

Genna crawls up on the sofa, and he sees the knees of her knit stockings are dirty, likely from crawling around on the floor, and he very nearly smiles, wants to tell her he roots around on his knees too. She’s cute for a kid, though he’s never taken much notice of children, wears a bright red dress and little black shoes, dressed up like she’s going to church, and he immediately wishes he’d spruced himself up a bit. He’s showered and in clean clothes but is nowhere near as polished as she is.

“Hey there,” he says, all gritty timbre and graveled words, and he winces inwardly, half expecting her to cry from the combined horror of his face and his rough voice. She looks up at him with her wide eyes, crystalline grey in her cherubic face, but she doesn’t say anything. Sandor begins to panic, but then he remembers the toy in his hands, how Margie said  _Think of it like an ice breaker, a way to let her know you were thinking of her._ He holds it out to her. “I uh, I got this for you, Genna,” he says, and she takes it wordlessly, petting its little black head as if it were a real dog, and then she snaps to action, twisting and getting on her knees, walking on them towards him. He is halfway in a recoil when she crawls onto his lap, plunking her little butt down on his leg as she curls up against him, black patent leather shoes on his knee as she rests her head on his chest.

“I’ll just give you two some time to get to know each other,” Gayle says as she slips out the door, and he is half tempted to beg her not to leave, but then there is the sound of a hitched breath and a sniffle against his shirt, and for the first time in his life he wraps his arms around a kid, offers her whatever comfort he can, hard a man as he is. It’s apparently enough because what tension was in her little limbs leaves and she’s a rag doll in his arms, a curl of dress and stockings around a little toy dog, the black of her hair a silken thing beneath his chin.

“Genna, come on, we’re going to miss our plane,” he says a week after meeting her, the successful adoption hearing behind them, their future just ahead so long as they can catch the goddamned plane. Margie and Bronn are a drift behind him, the lilt and laughter of their voices twining in his ears, and Genna is a trawl and drag at his side, her little hand engulfed in his.

“I’m tired, daddy,” she says, and he sighs. This  _daddy_ shit started last night when she called him daddy after he tucked her in, Margie by his side as she whispered  _Read her a book and find that dog toy,_  and he read Genna the room service menu while Margie rifled through the little girl’s belongings, searching for more suitable reading material.  _Goodnight, daddy,_  she’d said, much to his indefinable horror.

“Well come here then,” he says with a sigh, stooping down to sweep her up, and she clings to him like a burr, little arms a tight vise around his neck, knobby knees digging into his sides through her leggings. She’s light as a feather and he’s able to immediately pick up the pace, strides lengthening as he makes short work of the long corridor of the Tulsa airport, her hands two fists of flannel collar at the back of his neck. It is easy, holding her, Genna’s little body an inviting warmth, an answer, maybe, to a question he never thought to ask before. It’s easy, carrying her, and for the first time  since this insanity started he thinks maybe he can handle this. Sandor lifts his chin with a sniff, hefts her and flexes his forearms beneath her to reinforce his hold on her, and she burrows her face into the crook of his neck as Sandor takes her home.

 

March, 2014

 

“Are you serious with that?” Margie asks, pointing over Sandor’s shoulder to the words he’s typed into the text field. “You haven’t even said anything about you, Genna, where you live, nothing. Here,” she says, nudging his arm with her hip. “Get out of the chair, let me.”

She sits down at the desk in his office, the floor already a scatter of toys, and she is amused and delighted to see that not all of them are the ones she bought for Genna when they got back to Arizona.  _He’s been busy_ , she thinks with a grin as she cracks her knuckles and starts typing.

_Au Pair needed in Sonoita, AZ. I am a single man with guardianship of my niece, working full time throughout the week. I am in need of a live-in childcare worker to cover the weekday hours I am out of the house. Must undergo background check and have at least one letter of reference._

“There,” she says brightly once the flurry of her fingers stops, and she sits back in his chair when he leans over the desk to read the words on the screen.

“Why’d you have to say I’m single?” he complains, and Margie shrugs.

“So they know you don’t have any other support in the house. They’ll be aware of the responsibility, I guess, I don’t know,” she says with a huff. “There,” she says after adding the pay rate he mentioned earlier and his email address at the bottom of the ad, clicking “confirm” afterwards.

“Hey! I never signed off on that,” he says when she closes his laptop and stands, but she ignores him and his outburst, letting it trail off to muttered swear words.

She looks around the room, the heavy dark wood of his desk and the bookshelf full of almanacs and books on local plant and wildlife, the weight rack shoved in the corner. Margie’s heart twinges for him, for all he’s had to take on these past three months, how his life has unequivocally changed. He’s taken it in stride for the most part, though the two surviving Cleganes behave more like fraternity brothers than parental figure and child. They eat and fall asleep in front of the television, he does not argue when she wants pizza rolls for breakfast, and he swears like a sailor around her, though luckily she has yet to copy him, at least in front of Margie.

“You’re going to have to clear this room out, you know. You can’t have your nanny sleeping on the sofa out front,” she says as they leave the room, Sandor nudging a Barbie doll out of his path with the toe of his boot.

“I know,” he sighs. “One thing at a time,” he says, walking down the hall into the main room where Genna is parked right where they left her, in front of a doll house Margie couldn’t resist ordering on Amazon. Bronn is right beside her with a My Little Pony in his hands, and Genna is peal after peal of laughter as he makes it talk like Jabba the Hut. She smiles, bites her lip and lets her hand drift across her belly where she hopes one day a baby will be, a kick and a squirm, a little bloom of life that belongs to him and to her.

“Sandor!” Genna says when she looks up at him, a wide smile on her face as she sees her uncle. She lights up whenever he’s around, and it’s  _thawing_  him, Margie can tell, how she bounds up to him and drags him to the Jenga set at Hops and Vines, how she launches herself in his lap whenever he’s sitting on the sofa, how she tugs on his hair and messes with his stuff and turns his world upside down. He’s only known he’s an uncle for a matter of months and has only had Genna for three but he’s slowly easing himself into the role, however lawless the two of them are. He’s come a long way and she’s proud of him, but when Genna leaps to her feet and bolts out the back door, when Sandor bellows  _Goddammit, kid, I said no running out of the house_  and takes after her, she sends up a prayer that someone decent answers his ad, because he needs all the help he can get.

 

March, 2014

 

There haven’t been a whole lot of reasons for her to look forward to checking her emails now that she’s let most of her “friends” fall to the wayside after the whole debacle with Professor Baelish. Only two people other than family email her, and one of them is sitting on her bed beside her, chatting excitedly about her new position in Manhattan, which she’ll be starting as soon as her new charges’ school year ends in June. Sansa and Jeyne are drinking white wine and painting each other’s toes on a Friday night, which is about as exciting as her social life gets these days when her laptop chimes, announcing she’s got an email in her inbox.

“Maybe it’s Myranda! I can’t believe she’s been in Denmark for six weeks already,” Jeyne says with a luxurious, romantic sigh. "Are Danish guys hot?”

“No idea,” Sansa says, easing Jeye’s foot out of her lap, turning to the laptop sitting open on her nightstand. She pauses the Frou Frou Pandora station and tabs over to her inbox, sucking in a gasp when she sees the email from SClegane@gmail.

“He replied,” she murmurs, and Jeyne is a scoot across the bed to read over her shoulder. “He says I meet the requirements,” she says, and she can’t help but grin as she reads the rest of his no nonsense email, full of starting salary and questions about when she can start, and she wonders what life is like in Sonoita, Arizona.

 


End file.
